Using Ghost to upgrade hard drive - XP Pro SP1

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ken Hart
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Ken Hart

I created a totally clean XP system which is up and
running perfectly on my computer and have activated it.
I then used Norton Ghost to clone the system to a much
faster hard drive. Next, I replaced the old, slower
drive with the new, faster one. When I boot XP now it
goes through start up but stops just at the point where
it should present me with my user name choices. It just
shows the equivalent of that screen without any users.
There are no error messages nor options to select to
proceed.

However if I reinstall my old drive as a slave on the
system (so that both the slow and fast drives are
attached), the boot works perfectly. But it appears XP
reassigns drive letter and makes the slave my "C" drive.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on? I have a sense
it may be an activation issue but I'm not brought to a
screen where I can address it.

Up until now I've had no problem using Ghost in exactly
the same manner with Win98SE to upgrade hard drives.
 
Ken Hart said:
I created a totally clean XP system which is up and
running perfectly on my computer and have activated it.
I then used Norton Ghost to clone the system to a much
faster hard drive. Next, I replaced the old, slower
drive with the new, faster one. When I boot XP now it
goes through start up but stops just at the point where
it should present me with my user name choices. It just
shows the equivalent of that screen without any users.
There are no error messages nor options to select to
proceed.

However if I reinstall my old drive as a slave on the
system (so that both the slow and fast drives are
attached), the boot works perfectly. But it appears XP
reassigns drive letter and makes the slave my "C" drive.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on? I have a sense
it may be an activation issue but I'm not brought to a
screen where I can address it.

Up until now I've had no problem using Ghost in exactly
the same manner with Win98SE to upgrade hard drives.
Click to expand...

After you ghosted the drive, you should have removed the old one before
rebooting or the old drive retains the C drive letter and the new one takes
on the D drive letter. When you remove the old drive and reboot with the new
one in place, it's still D, so it can boot fully--all the pointers in the
registry, etc. are pointing to C, but there is no C drive, just a D.

This can also happen if you do the ghosting wrong.

Your best bet would be to re-ghost the drive and make sure you follow the
directions very carefully. It's pretty easy to miss a step when you're
confident that you know what you're doing.
 
Ken Hart said:
I created a totally clean XP system which is up and
running perfectly on my computer and have activated it.
I then used Norton Ghost to clone the system to a much
faster hard drive. Next, I replaced the old, slower
drive with the new, faster one. When I boot XP now it
goes through start up but stops just at the point where
it should present me with my user name choices. It just
shows the equivalent of that screen without any users.
There are no error messages nor options to select to
proceed.

However if I reinstall my old drive as a slave on the
system (so that both the slow and fast drives are
attached), the boot works perfectly. But it appears XP
reassigns drive letter and makes the slave my "C" drive.

Does anyone have an idea what's going on? I have a
sense it may be an activation issue but I'm not brought
to a screen where I can address it.

Up until now I've had no problem using Ghost in exactly
the same manner with Win98SE to upgrade hard drives.
Click to expand...

No, not an activation issue. It has to do with the fact XP, unlike Win98,
remembers drive letters by partition signature -- it's not that XP is
*reassigning* your slave as C:, the old drive was previously C: and still
is, so the new drive isn't. The new XP starts booting but hangs, usually at
the Welcome screen or user name screen, looking in vain for drive C:.

What you need to do is force the XP on the new disk to forget the previous
drive letter assignments. One easy way to do that is to remove the old
drive from the system, get a Win98 boot floppy, boot from the floppy, issue
the command "fdisk /mbr", remove the floppy, then reboot into the new XP and
see if everything comes up correctly. The Win98 version of fdisk forces XP
to forget the previous assignments (the similar "fixmbr" command from the XP
recovery console will not).
 
Thanks for your response. I may not, however, understand
what you're suggesting I do. First off, both the old and
new drives have 2 partitions; so the old drive was C,D
and the new one G, H (E and F are CD/DVDs). I was only
Ghosting the C partition to the G partition (don't know
if that matters - it didn't in Win98SE)

When I Ghosted, I did it from a Ghost boot diskette
created using SystemWorks 2004 and I did a partition to
partition copy. All partitions on both hard drives are
FAT 32. After Ghosting, I did remove the old drive
(which had been the master - C,D), re-jumpered the new
drive to be the master and installed it by itself. That
was the point at which I was unable to boot the new drive.

The only way I could get the system to boot was to re-
jumper the old drive to make it a slave and add it in
along with the new drive. When I did this it shows up in
Windows Explorer as C, D (even though it's the slave).

So, at this time I can boot if I either just have the old
drive as a master OR if I have both the old drive as a
slave and the new drive the master. What I can't do is
boot with only the new drive attached as the master.

Just to be sure, I re-ghosted the partition and followed
your directions. Nothing's changed.

Any further help/ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
its a sysprep issue. symantec states in various kb articles that a direct
clone of xp will not work w/o running sysprep first.
I have done it a few times, not to difficult. download sysprep from
microsoft and while using the original drive run the sysprep program.

a better (easier) way is to create a backup of the c drive in a separate
partition on the slower drive. this way you are not cloning the OS, just
creating a backup. then configure the new drive as master, old as slave.
make sure your primary partition on new drive is at least as large as the
original. then boot to the ghost boot floppy and restore. this puts the
image you created as the c drive on new disk. if both drives are eide it
should go easy, worked for me many times. if you are switching to a sata
drive you have to go the sysprep route.
 
FIXED!!!!!!! You hit the nail on the head. Running
FDISK solved the problem. And I didn't have any issue
with activation once the new drive was up and running.

Thank you for your time and expertise.
 
I think I had the same thing happening not to long
ago.... the error was with the partion recieving from
Ghost... it had to be (active) activated before. If you
use an older version of ghost, if I remembered well. Hope
this help you!!
 
Prior to trying Im Dan's suggestion (see previous post in
thread) I tried yours. Did the Ghost Image backup as
suggested and then restored it to the new drive. Then
booted from the new drive and ended up with the same hang
as before. So, I'm glad it works for you; didn't for
me. Fortunately Dan's method worked without a hitch and
I'm now up and running much faster on the new drive.

Thanks for taking the time to help.
 
Ken Hart said:
FIXED!!!!!!! You hit the nail on the head. Running
FDISK solved the problem. And I didn't have any issue
with activation once the new drive was up and running.

Thank you for your time and expertise.
Click to expand...

You're welcome. FTR, XP remembers drive letters by partition signatures,
which are derived in part from the Disk ID (a 4-byte code buried at the end
of the MBR) and the starting sector location of the partition on the disk.
In your case, you must have partitioned and/or formatted the new disk and
let XP see it before doing the cloning. Once the old XP saw the new
partitions, it assigned new drive letters (G, H), and those were recorded in
the registry. The registry was cloned along with XP to the new disk, but by
now it had a record of the new disk's partitions as G and H. At this point,
trying to boot from the new disk doesn't do any good because it "remembers"
it is G:, and it's downhill from there.

The Win98 "fdisk /mbr" command and the XP "fixmbr" command are intended to
rewrite the MBR, but the Win98 version doesn't know about Disk ID's and
inadvertantly overwrites those four bytes. In this case, we take advantage
of that "mistake" because it has the effect of invalidating the partition
signatures -- since the signature is derived from the Disk ID and the Disk
ID has been changed, XP is forced to recalculate the signatures and reassign
drive letters, forgetting it used to be G:.
 
You are obviously a man who knows his XP. I'm
continually impressed by the quality of support on these
newsgroups. I'm fairly knowledgeable and can figure most
things out so when I can't it's usually something which
is somewhat obscure. Often a Microsoft MVP will end up
answering my question so it's even more impressive when
just a regular participant comes up with the solution.

Hope there are others out there to help when you run into
a glitch.

Ken
 
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