XP won't allow removal of cloned drive!

[Inspector J Lee]

Hello,

I just bought a new Western Digital 40GB hard disk to replace my 5-year-old
C drive. I used PartitionMagic to clone the drive and then made it an active
drive. I then swapped the cables out so the new drive is in the master
position on the cable and the old drive is on another IDE connection running
thru a raid controller (in non-raid state) on the motherboard. I did all
this to free up an ATAPI spot to install a DVD player. The screwy thing is
the XP operating system won't allow me to remove the old hard disk
completely. It gives me an error about not being able to confirm the
registration before it even loads Windows. This is fine for now, but if the
old drive goes south at some point, I'm dead in the water. How do I transfer
the validation from the old C drive to the new (still) G drive? I also have
Norton Ghost 2002 and I haven't yet renamed the new G drive to C (scared it
will deep six the whole system). Any clues on how to proceed? i DO NOT want
to reformat anything!

Thanks.

Steve Franklin

--
Lian Li PC68 case
Soyo P4S (SiS 645) Dragon Ultra main board
1.5 GHz Pentium 4 processor
2x256 MB Crucial PC2100 DIMM DDR RAM
Enermax 350 W power supply
Western Digital AC36400L 6 GB hard disk (C drive)
Western Digital WD1200JB 120 GB, 8 MB cache hard disk (F drive)
Matrox Millennium P750 video card
Creative Soundblaster AudioPCI sound card
(attached to Kenwood stereo receiver and
JBL 4313B Control Monitors
Sony CRX220A1 52X CD-R/RW drive
SIIG USB 5-Port PCI
Zoom External V.92 Voice Faxmodem
Sony SDM-S81 TFT LCD Monitor
Windows XP Home Edition

 

[Georges Jullien]

I just bought a new Western Digital 40GB hard disk to replace my 5-year-old
C drive. I used PartitionMagic to clone the drive and then made it an active
drive. I then swapped the cables out so the new drive is in the master
position on the cable and the old drive is on another IDE connection running
thru a raid controller (in non-raid state) on the motherboard. I did all
this to free up an ATAPI spot to install a DVD player. The screwy thing is
the XP operating system won't allow me to remove the old hard disk
completely. It gives me an error about not being able to confirm the
registration before it even loads Windows. This is fine for now, but if the
old drive goes south at some point, I'm dead in the water. How do I transfer
the validation from the old C drive to the new (still) G drive? I also have
Norton Ghost 2002 and I haven't yet renamed the new G drive to C (scared it
will deep six the whole system). Any clues on how to proceed? i DO NOT want
to reformat anything!

Steve
After a copy, the registry of the new drive points to many files on the old
drive. It is necessary to swap the letters of C and G in the G registry
using http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q223188 . More
informations at http://perso.numericable.fr/gjullien/copy_xp.htm
Georges Jullien