Swapping hard drives

[John Cole]

My daughter's hard drive C: crashed last week. It
started having all kinds of problems -- wouldn't boot --
couldn't even start in safe mode. Took it in to service
shop. They said it was unrecoverable. She was on Windows
ME. They installed a new hard drive F: and talked her
into going to Windows XP . They put XP on the new drive
F. When Windows starts up now, it begins and then she has
to press F1 to boot and it boots OK from drive F. She had
not backed up all of her data files, so they left drive C
on. None of her old programs will execute, but her data
files can be copied over to the new drive.

Now we'd like to swap the drives so that she can boot the
normal way from drive C instead of F. We will probably
then physically remove the old drive completely, or we
might keep it for back-up files if it seems to be usable
for that. The question is: How can we accomplish the
swap of C and F?

 

[Petey]

I would first copy over all the data files that she needs to the new drive.
Remove both drives set the jumper on the back of the new drive to master (or
read the jumper diagram on the drive) depending on whether it's the only
drive on that cable and reinstall it by connecting the ribbon cable and the
power connector. When you start your PC Windows should detect the new drive
as C.

 

[FredP]

While I've not tried that exact scenario, I would be surprised if he did not get an NTLDR and/or boot.ini error when booting up. The boot.ini file would be looking for XP on HD-1.

If so, a 'repair' from the XP CD should solve that. See Michael Stevens excellent step-by-step instructions for doing a Repair at: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

HTH ... Fred

 

[Delwin Lee [MSFT]]

Yes. Even if you able to get your system to boot, you will likely experience
problems when running applications.

As suggested earlier, you will probably need to reinstall once you've done
the drive swap.

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

I sure would like to see a KB article reference that would confirm this.
Or even a user that posts back and confirms that a repair install
actually worked. Have you seen either, Delwin?

 

[Petey]

John
If you follow my suggestion and it causes error messages or apps not
running then just jumper both drives as previously set by your shop and
look for another solution.