On Mon, 2 May 2005 15:10:01 +0930, "Antonin Koudelka"
I have an IBM A31p notebook. I bought a bigger hard disk 80GB.
How are you hosting both HDs at the same time, given the "real" host
is a laptop? In cases like this, I've been using a real PC with an
adapter to hook up the smaller HDs.
I need to transfer everything from the old disk to the new one. Normally
I would do this using Partition Magic and would not have any problems.
However, Partition Magic sees the old disk as a bad one
That's alarming! Is the 80G in fact bad?
If so, I'd...
http://cquirke.mvps.org/pccrisis.htm
....and, after cherry-picking the data, I'd be using
www.bootitng.com
(Boot It New Generation, aka BING) to do the imaging.
If the HD is not physically bad, then there's likely an issue with the
way it is "seen" by the system that is hosting the transfer. This may
apply if the host is unable to "see: HDs beyond a certain capacity.
These capacity limits are a function of the motherboard's BIOS, and
common ones arise at 528M, 8G, 32G and 137G, with less-common ones at
2G and odd points between 32G and 137G.
When these limits kick in, you may see one of two failure patterns:
1) The system hard-locks when the HD is detected
This applies with the 32G and oddball 32G-137G limits. Because the
lock-up happens when BIOS attempts to see the HD, this cannot be
worked around by drivers, because the drivers will never load.
The fix is to either replace the BIOS (upgrades, or add-in controller
cards) or to jumber the HD so it behaves like a 32G, and then use it
as such (losing the rest of the capacity). Not all HDs can do this.
2) The system sees the HD, but only as the capacity limit
This applies to 528M, 8G and 137G limits; larger HDs are seen as
"508M", 8G and 137G respectively. In addition to the above fixes, one
can often run a "Dynamic Drive Overlay" (DDO) driver from within the
HD's Master Boot Record; this loads when the MBR code is loaded, and
replaces the BIOS's addressing logic.
Use of a DDO is dangerous, because anything that writes to the MBR (OS
installs, boot sector malware and fixers thereof, partition managers)
can kill the code needed to access your HD's contents.
In addition, boot methods that bypass the MBR won't run the DDO; this
applies when the HD is not the boot device, either because some other
HD is booted first, or because you do a true 1.44M, CD or USB boot.
There's a high risk of data corruption too, because not only do
different addressing methods see different capacities, they lay out
the disk in a different way so that different parts of the disk are
seen in different places. Anything that writes to the disk under such
circumstances is quite likely to irreversibly corrupt the contents.
More factors to consider...
The BIOS is not the only point of capacity addressing failure; the OS
can be a failure point, too. Some OSs take their cue from BIOS while
others look at the HD directly; the latter may se the full capacity of
the HD even if the BIOS cannot.
Operating systems older than XP SP1 generally cannot see beyond 137G.
Multiple capacity limits may apply. For example, you may have a BIOS
that has the 8G limit, but not the 32G limit, so that a 40G HD will be
detected as 8G, and seen as 40G if the 8G limit is worked around. A
BIOS that had the 32G limit would have locked up detecting the HD.
So: What laptop is it? How big is the original HD? What system is
being used to host the transfer? Is there some sort of DDO code
already in place on either of the HDs?
partition to the new disk. I put both disks on a Promise Ultra controller in
a pc and copied everything form the old disk to the new one using Windows
Explorer.
That will not result in a bootable XP installation, even if you are
rigorous in showing and transferring all files. A Win9x would take
that in its stride, but NT is a fragile POS here. You have to image
the partition over, which is why a small C: is guuuud.
When I put the new disk into the notebook it crashes with a blue screen.
When I try to repair it using slipstreamed XP Pro with SP2 from MSDN
subscription, it goes as far as "saving configuration" and there it stays
forever.
Is there a way how to do it without new installation of XP and all
applications?
My priorities would be:
1) Preserve your data, if original HD is failing
2) Preserve your original HD as-is, for fallback
3) Ensure no addressing horrors are about to bite
4) Image old HD to new HD (try BING)
5) Follow up with us from there, on how that goes
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Gone to bloggery:
http://cquirke.blogspot.com