Unable to clone old hard drive to new

[huerfanista]

I'm trying to replace my old 27gb seagate drive with a WD Caviear SE 80 gb drive, by cloning my XP Home installation (ASUS A7S333 mb, Athlon XP2400, 512 mb mem), and I've not been able to reboot successfully with the new drive. Here's what I've done so far:

- installed the new drive as a slave (they're both IDE drives), which works fine - full capacity recognized by the OS and BIOS.

- tried using Partition Magic 7.0 to copy the partition from the old to new drive. Unable to boot when the old drive was disconnected ("System disk error", or something like that from the BIOS).

- tried using Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools to clone the partition. I was able to boot from the drive, but only got to the "Welcome to Windows XP" screen, with none of my 2 user account buttons displayed; hence, I couldn't login to XP - or do anything, for that matter.

- tried using XXClone (freeware version) to do the same thing, and got the same result as Data Lifeguard.

Any advice would be most appreciated.

[Baddog]

Did you fdisk disk the new drive to set the partition active?

[huerfanista]

Did you fdisk disk the new drive to set the partition active?

All of the tools I used do this (PM7.0, DataLifeGuard tools, and XXClone) did this. As I said, I can boot off the new drive, I just can't enter the OS because none of my user accounts shows up.

[G]

 "NO ROM BASIC - SYSTEM HALTED" or "No boot device available, strike F1 to retry, F2 for setup utility" or "No boot sector on fixed disk, strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility" or "Non-System disk or disk error, replace and strike any key when ready" or "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". (Solution: Set a primary partition to "active", partition the hard disk drive and then set the primary partition to "active". Each partition table entry is 16-bytes long, with a maximum of four entries, each with a Boot Indicator byte: these bytes are at offset 446 (partition table entry #1 (0x1BE or 1BEh)), at offset 462 (partition table entry #2 (0x1CE or 1CEh)), at offset 478 (partition table entry #3 (0x1DE or 1DEh)), and finally at offset 494 (partition table entry #4 (0x1EE or 1EEh)). These Boot Indicators are used to determine whether the partition is active (bootable) by checking for the value 0x80 or 80h. The remaining Boot Indicators will have a value of 0x00 or 00h. Consequently, whether all four table entries have 00h then the MBR returns control to the motherboard ROM, putting into effect interrupt 18 (INT 18) and the boot process stops). This is a non-fatal POST error message.

Use PM V7 to set the primary partition to active and then apply.

You should have cloned with an imaging program such as Acronis True Image V9.

Moreover the HDD manufacture would have had a free too to clone disk-to-disk. Using PM V7 in this way is not ideal.

[BipolarBill]

Try this:

http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

Remember to remove the old drive when you're ready to boot. Put the new drive in exactly the same position as the old.

[Ol'Tunzafun]

If you are going to run the WD drive alone, be sure that the jumpers are set to do so.
Usually this means no jumpers at all but you can check it out at the WD Site (http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=84&p_created=1005005461&p_sid=hjZMWTbi&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX 3Jvd19jbnQ9MzE3JnBfcHJvZHM9JnBfY2F0cz0mcF9wdj0mcF9 jdj0mcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1zZWFyY2hfZm5sJnBfcGFnZT0xJ nBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9anVtcGVyIHNldHRpbmdz&p_li=&p_topview=1) .

[huerfanista]

I finally figured out what the problem was, thanks to a post on overclockers.com :

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=363897 (post #9 by PopRichie)

which makes the point that it's important that WinXP not "see" the new hdd until after the cloning process is complete. What I did was to delete all of the existing partitions on the new hdd using Partition Magic, and then reboot. The new drive is not seen by XP, and I then ran WD's Data Lifeguard Tools to create a new boot disk. After the copy completed, it shut down the system and I removed the old drive, set the new one as a master, and booted up with the new drive with no problems.