new hard drive-Windows XP won't boot 1

[Bill10023]

I recently upgraded a friend's Win98SE system to WinXP Pro. Everything ran fine and I converted the drive to NTFS.

Then he wanted to get a larger hard drive. I installed the second hard drive without any problems, making it into 3 logical NTFS partitions.

Now to top it off, he just bought another larger hard drive and wanted me to copy over the contents and OS of the old drive to the new one and junk the old one. (Both are Western Digital)

After using WD's LifeGuard Tools to copy the original C: drive to the slave drive I swapped out the old drive and made the new hard drive the Master and the second new drive the slave.

Why won't it boot? Western Digital says that it is aware of the problem, but hasn't come up with a satisfactory answer. Is there a simpler solution to this mess?

Or do I have to reverse the whole process and install the old original drive as the master, uninstall XP back to Win 98SE (btw, will the file format revert to the original FAT32?) and then do the LifeGuard Tool copy over to the reformatted newer drive and finally start the whole WinXP upgrade installation again... Yikes!!!

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[wolluf]

What message do you get when you try to boot?

You could try running recovery console (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654)

with the new drive in place and running the fixboot command. If that doesn't work, could try again and run chkdsk.

PS. You can't uninstall XP since you converted to NTFS. Also, upgrade from win98 is not best option for future stability (backup and clean install of XP after wiping the drive is better - takes a bit longer as have to reinstall apps, but generally worth it. So, you could do clean install to new drive - as old drive still available with all data on it).
PPS. Do you have Ghost or Drive Image? (might do better job of copying partition if you want to keep existing set up and fixboot or any other ideas suggested don't work).

 

[conceptumator]

I had the same problem when I upgraded my Seagate drive. It seems that although they claim to work, most of the drive utilities from the manufacturers don't work with XP. What I would up doing was creating a Ghost image, then restoring it. Real pain. It all comes back to the MS authentication process. I can support them on eliminating pirated software, but they really need to cut people some slack on reinstalls and upgrades. Good luck.

 

[DanClark86]

Another option is a utility called Sysprep. it will be on the XP Installation CD,
1. Place all of your Data back on the smaller hard drive and get back into Windows XP,
2. Find Sysprep (microsoft utility for cloaning systems) and run it. Do not try to reboot the computer back to windows at this point, instead use the WD Lifeguard utility and copy the drive back to the larger one.
3. Restart with the larger drive as the master.
4. On boot-up you will go through a Mini-Setup where it will ask you for your User name, Product ID, Comptuer name and Protocal information.
5. when this is complete you will be back up and running.

 

[conceptumator]

DanClark86 definitely has a better idea than mine. I tried to do it his way, but didn't have enough brains to figure it out. Thanks, Dan, I'll copy this one down for future use.

 

[Bill10023]

DanClark86 gave some excellent advice. I did have to reboot the system back to WinXP with the original drive for it to perform a chkdsk on the newly copied partitioned drive to correct some errors.

Once that was done, I swapped out the old drive for the two new drives. It didn't go through a mini-setup routine, although it went throught the plug 'n play routine. (Could be because I set the sysprep to the factory setting.) :-D

Once I complete the updates and install the remaining software, I guess I'll reseal it to set the SID.

Thanks again for everyone's advice and your help, in particular.