XP Pro Boot Problem After HD Replace

[Chris LeFebvre]

I've got an HP / Compaq notebook where the smart diags indicated a
failing hard drive, HP shipped me a replacement drive under warranty and
I removed the drive and used a couple of notebook hard drive adapters to
hook them up as master and slave on the secondary channel of one of my
desktops. I then used Ghost to clone the failing drive to the
replacement since I really didn't want to have to reinstall all my
applications again. The clone completed without any seeming problems
however I haven't been able to get the new drive to boot up, the problem
is that I just get a blank screen with a flashing cursor and no boot
menu, end of story...

I happen to have a Win XP Pro full version CD and I am able to boot
from the CD to the recovery console, I've tried the following:

Chkdsk /R - Did find and fix some problem the first time around, but
didn't find anything wrong on subsequent runs.

Fixboot - ran with no problems but still no go.

FixMbr - indicated "This computer appears to have a non-standard or
invalid master boot record", no matter how many times I've run this and
it says it's rewritten the MBR successfully it still says the same
thing.

In-place upgrade - I've run an in-place upgrade twice and both times
it completes and says the system will reboot and the installation will
continue but it still gets stuck on the reboot.

Following the two in-place upgrades I've rerun all of the previous steps
and I still can't get it to boot, nor do I get any type of error message
that indicates what the problem is. This is not the first time I've done
this and no matter Win2K or XP I've never had it fail to boot or give me
a clue about what the problem was so that I could fix it. Anyone have an
idea or two on anything else to try to get this fixed?

Thanks,
Chris LeFebvre

 

[GreenieLeBrun]

Is drive is jumpered as master and set up correctly in the BIOS?

 

[Maurice N ~ MVP]

Do you know if the boot partition is marked (been set) to active? Sometimes one forgets to do that when migrating to a new HD.

 

[Chris LeFebvre]

The original drive had no jumpers installed, and neither did the
replacement.. As a matter of fact I had to install and then remove
jumpers to set them as master and slave when I hooked them up to my
desktop computer in order to clone the disk. The bios does show the
drive correctly also.

Thanks,
- Chris LeFebvre

 

[Chris LeFebvre]

Hi Maurice:
I haven't actually looked at that (can you run fdisk from the recovery
console?) but in every previous case where I used Ghost to clone a disk
it took care of setting the partition active and the replacements always
booted up just fine.

Thanks,
- Chris LeFebvre

 

[Maurice N ~ MVP]

Fdisk is NOT in the Recovery Console set of commands. Matter of fact, it's
not in XP.
What the Recovery console does have is the Diskpart command.

Once you get in recovery console:
1.. Type:
diskpart

2.. At the DISKPART prompt, type:
list partition

Make note of the number of the partition that you want to mark as active.

3.. At the DISKPART prompt, type:
select partition n

Select the partition, n, you want to mark as active.

4.. At the DISKPART prompt, type:
active

5. Lastly, use EXIT to get out of Recovery Console

You are likely correct on Ghost. I've never used it.

HTH

 

[Guest]

You need to re-format and re-install!

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Ghost 9.0 (previously Drive Image 7) does have an option to
check if the partition containing the cloned system is to be
marked "active". It also asks if the HD containing the clone
is to have the source HD's MBR copied to the destination HD.
The OP may not have checked one or both of these options.

For simple cloning of a single partition, or of an entire HD
(the user is given the option), Casper XP works fine. It's
cheaper than Ghost or True Image, and it can be downloaded
from Future Systems at http://fssdev.com/products/casperxp/
for a free trial. What Casper XP doesn't have are all the cute
scheduling of automatic incremental backups and backups
to optical media, etc.

*TimDaniels*