DescentBB

Maybe some of y'all have encountered this problem before..... I'm having a LOT of trouble ghosting my XP Pro OS to a new HDD. Here's the deal; I have a 10GB maxtor HDD that has my original WinXP OS on it that is a single partition. I've loaded it so full of junk that I bought another HDD, a Maxtor 120GB, that I've partitioned into 5 separate drives. I used Norton's Ghost software to ghost the former "C:" drive onto the "D:" drive [the new 120GB]. I will not use the included Maxblast software, due to the last time I did, it wiped all partitions out and I lost all of my data simply by starting the program! I then removed the "C:" drive with the original boot/OS and tried to boot off of the new HDD/ghost (which has been appropriately jumpered as the master drive). Norton says to reboot a few times on the new drive, but I must've re-booted a half-dozen times, tried every kind of directory restore and safe mode boot available after that. It hangs at the "login" screen. That's the one where it's a blue screen that flashes the WinXP logo briefly, then the logo moves aside and you pick who you want to login as. I never get that far, it hangs on the blue screen with the logo and never moves. It's driving me friggin NUTS! Luckily my original HDD with the OS on it, when plugged back in and jumpered as the master, boots XP just fine. Any suggestions on how to make the image work right? Incidentally, I can't change the drive letters in windows to make the new drive (D the "C:" drive, as some research on the web makes me think this might be part of the prob. HELP!

Use the XP disk to run a repair install on it, should work.

I had a problem like you describe. I got a new drive to replace my c: drive, hooked it up and let XP partition and format it, used Ghost to copy the partition to the new drive, then removed the old drive and tried to boot off the new drive. This did not work. The new drive would not boot.

I then used the included software to reformat/partition the new drive, used Ghost and copied the partition (all this was done w/o booting to XP.) Then I removed the old drive and left the new one in. This time, XP booted.

Maybe I'm superstitious, but now when I use Ghost to back up my drives, I power down and attach the backup drive, then run ghost and then remove the backup drive before booting back to XP. In other words, I never let XP look at the backup drive.

Well, here's the soulution I was able to come up with, and I found it out of sheer frustration:

After searching tech website after website, microsoft, manufacturer, and many many others, there was no solution I found that worked. Most of them said to use the "recovery console" that was available on the XP CD "X:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons". This never worked, because it gave me an error that it could not be run in DOS. I got it working by installing it in the original xp install and then ghosting the whole thing all over again. Frustratingly enough, even though this was the most common suggestion, no one anywhere said what to do with the console once you had it working. So axe that idea. Another way was to repair the installation, but I couldn't get it to boot past the login screen; so I couldn't run the repair option on the CD under windows. After trying to create a set of boot disks from a Microsoft download that should allow the CD to work in DOS, that failed too. The disks always seemed to have errors on them and would abort the setup. Finally, I tried a program in the CD's I386 DOS directory just above winnt32.exe, it was plain old winnt.exe. It immediately worked, and instantly began the setup. The only drawback was that smartdrive wasn't active, so the setup took forever. Not one of the scores of websites I looked at suggested this particular app, sheer frustration caused me to try it. I just need to transfer over the rest of my partitons and rebuld the registry links, no big deal thanks to some other software that I have. This only took 3 days and much banging of the head on the keyboard to figure out.

Someone should have mentioned that most microsoft OS disks since Windows98SE are bootible, and you can run a repair install from there.

For some reason, my CD was not bootable, a problem Microsoft knows about (they say some PC's have the prob, no explanation why). If I'd had an OEM disk, it would've worked, but it was the upgrade CD. I tried every combination of DOS boot disks I could with system files and drivers, but it wouldn't run.