Hard drive problems- please bear with me

[budman]

My computer had a Maxtor 80G drive as the master, and a Maxtor 60G as a slave.
Both drives partitioned three times. Primary drive- C, D, & E. Secondary H, I,
& J.

The slave drive started to grind and slowed the whole system way down. I
managed to get the data off to CD then unhooked it. Maxtor sent a replacement
80G drive under warranty. I installed it as the slave and decided that I wanted
it as the primary drive.

I used Maxtor Maxblast 4 to make 3 partitions and copied the contents of D & E
to the new I & J. I "believe" that for some reason, the H partition was
indicating that it was NOT formatted, but that was a few frustrating days ago.

I tried to image my C with Ghost 9 to J as I have always done, but it always
came up as incomplete because the drive was full. (??) Anyhow, I then used the
copy feature of Ghost 9 to copy C to D. Apparently it formats it in the
process.

I then switched the primary and slave plugs, (both drives jumpered cable select)
and it booted just fine. I ran it for a couple of days but before I
re-formatted my 'old' primary drive, something made me take it out of the
system. That's when I found that my 'new' primary drive would NOT boot. I
hooked the 'old' primary back up and everything works fine.

I thought that I had an MBR problem and ran recovery console to fix. I can
select either 1- C:\Windows or 2- D:\Windows and get the following:

"Caution: computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot
record.
FIXMBR may damage your partition tables if you proceed.
This could cause all partitions on the current hard disk to become inaccessible.
If you are not having problems accessing your drive do not continue." I aborted
that exercise for now.

I also find that if I go to the command prompt from my new boot drive, it
displays - H:\ Documents and settings\Owner>, so something is very wrong.

If anyone can make anything out of this long-winded message and offer some
assistance it would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[budman]

I see Pegasus is active today and am wondering if he saw this previous post that
I sent yesterday. I have changed a few things in my reply BTW.
I'm not too sure of myself with your suggestions. I have located the
diskmgmt.msc tool within 'Administrative tools\disk management' but don't know
how to use it. I do know that when I click on 'Action\rescan disks' there is a
small window about 3/4"x3" that flashes too fast to read. There is dialog in
there and it looks like a round red circle to the left but I can't read it in
the brief moment it's there.

When I highlight 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE' and under 'file' it says 'load hive'. When
I click on that, the C:\Documents and Settings\Owner window opens and I don't
know where to go from there.

Thanks for your assistance

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I see Pegasus is active today and am wondering if he saw this previous post that
I sent yesterday. I have changed a few things in my reply BTW.

I'm not too sure of myself with your suggestions. I have located the
diskmgmt.msc tool within 'Administrative tools\disk management' but don't know
how to use it. I do know that when I click on 'Action\rescan disks' there is a
small window about 3/4"x3" that flashes too fast to read. There is dialog in
there and it looks like a round red circle to the left but I can't read it in
the brief moment it's there.

When I highlight 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE' and under 'file' it says 'load hive'. When
I click on that, the C:\Documents and Settings\Owner window opens and I don't
know where to go from there.

Thanks for your assistance

If your experience with these things is limited then I recommend
that you ask a more experienced friend for assistance, to stay on
the safe side. Here are my instructions again, somewhat expanded.

a) The first partition of disk 2 may not be set to "active". You can fix
this
with the diskmgmt.msc snap-in:
1. Click Start
2. Click Run
3. Type diskmgmt.msc
4. Click OK
5. Right-click the partition you need to mark active.
6. Click "Mark Partition Active".

b) The drive references in the registry of the cloned disk may be incorrect.
You can fix this by taking these steps:
1. Boot the machine with both disks installed.
2. Run regedit.exe.
3. Single-click HKLM.
4. Click File / Load Hive
5. Type d:\Windows\System32\config\system {OK}
(or whatever the location of the SYSTEM file is on your second disk)
6. Type MountedDevices {OK}.
7. You will get a new key called "Mounted Devicees". Single click it.
8. Click File. The item "Unload Hive" must NOT be greyed out. If it is
then you're in the wrong spot.
9. Navigate to the key "MountedDevices" inside the current key.
10. Delete all keys that look like so: \DosDevices\X: where X can
be any letter of the alphabet.
11. Shut your machine down.
12. Remove the old disk.
13. Boot with the new disk.

 

[budman]

I'm assuming that disk 2 first partition is set to "active" because "Mark
Partition Active" is greyed out.

My second disk is "H" where original OS is.
Therefore: H:\Windows\System32\config\system

At this point, I get an error message stating:
"Cannot load H:\Windows\System32\config\system: The process cannot access the
file because it is being used by another process."

Don't know where to go from here. I have backed up both drives and all
partitions to a new external USB drive. I figure I can at least restore
everything back where it was with Ghost 9 if I screw something up completely.

 

[Z]

Re: Hard drive problems- please bare with me

I prefer to keep my clothes on, but thanks for the offer.