Replacing faulty HD, problems copying XP over

[MattK]

I am in the process of replacing my hard drive from
Western Digital. The original was giving me occasional
bad boot sectors. I followed WD's instructions in
partitioning and formatting the new drive as well as
copying the boot drive over. Everything looked good so
far. However, as I switched the new drive to master, old
drive to slave (or even disconnect the old drive), I could
not get XP to start up, the last screen I see is the XP
window just prior to seeing the logon screen and it
freezes there. I did copy all my non-boot drives over to
the new HD (D:, E:, F, so all the data is there. But
now an error occured on my old HD again and I cannot boot
up period. I'm trying to understand what option should I
take. In trying to boot up the old drive I get an error
that says cannot find drivers.inf, use recovery
console...I am not good at working with DOS prompts. I
thought about just reloading XP on the new drive (fresh
start), but XP wants to reformat the drive before it
installs. I am nervous about losing the info I have on
the boot drive if I do this and cannot retrieve the info
from the old boot drive. Which way should I go, or is
there a better option for me? Thanks!!

 

[Rich Barry]

Matt, go here to get a bootdisk. www.bootdisk.com then using your
floppy drive and fdisk see if you
can set the new drives boot partition as active. Just follow the
instructions. Leave the old drive disconnected. First go into the Bios and
set the floppy as first boot device.