Finally copied partitions, now won't boot

I had a tough time using Disk Director Suite 10 (latest build) to copy my 700 GB drive (of which only a small portion is used) to a smaller but faster 150 GB drive. I am doing this because I would like to confine my operating system to one drive vs having the same drive for my operating system also contain my partitions for my files. This is a Dell Vista machine (XPS 420).

I had several iterations where the system rebooted and said everything was complete, then I would find nothing was actually done. As one of the members on this forum suggested (thank you!) I created the Acronis boot-up disk manager and running it this way finally resulted in copying everything over.

However, the new drive does not boot up. I am not sure why. I get an error related to no bootable drive and then it fails to boot.

If I look at the original drive, I have:
- a 47MB FAT 16 primary partition
- a 15 GB Recovery primary partition that Dell creates
- the active primary partition that boots up (C which only has about 25 GB in use and the rest (600+) was empty.

I resized that C drive down to 117 GB so that it would copy ok over to the new drive.

The new drive, 150 GB, is a Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM model. I was able to copy the 47 MB FAT primary partition and the 15 GB Recovery primary partition. I eventually succeeded in copying the resized C drive as the active primary partition. If I look at the original and new drives, their contents seem the same. They look the same in Windows disk management and in Acronis, other than the different total size of the hard disks.

Regardless, if I unplug the SATA cable from the original drive and plug it into the new one (making the new one the 0-position and the original no longer present), I do not get it to boot up. I tried running Dell's diagnostic routines on the new drive and they showed no issues on the new drive.

Any ideas on what I may have missed or what I can do to get this to work?

Thanks! Your time and help appreciated!

 

I think I resolved this. Looking at other posts I saw a note on running the Vista CD to check for repairs. It found a line it didn't like and changed it, and now everything seems to work fine.

The real key for me was to create the boot disk manager as mentioned here. The software should really make this clear...

Thanks.

 

Sounds to me like you need to copy the master boot record (MBR) from the large disk to the smaller one. The MBR is independant of any partitions or operating system - whatever is in it is executed by the BIOS once it has done its initial things - and if there is nothing in the MBR then the system will not boot.

oops, your second post wasn't there when I wrote that above - seems that the Vista CD sorted it! , and yes, the boot CD is always a good idea