Make New Drive the Boot Drive?

I have a new drive (WD 500mb sata) which i have installed and it is configured as D drive. I wish to clone my current boot drive (WD 250mb sata) onto the new drive and configure it as the boot drive. I use XP Pro as OS.

I made Acronis boot disc, booted to it, ran 'Clone Disc', and cloned the contents of my old drive (WD 250mb configured as C) to my new drive (WD 500mb configured as D). Directly following this, as computer shut down, I disconnected the sata cable to my old drive (WD 250mb), rebooted, checked in BIOS (which didn't recognise presence of old drive) to make sure I am booting to new drive and proceeded. During bootup, got a message 'error loading operating system' and couldn't go any further.

This is the second time I have carried out this process. I can't work out what is going wrong. Any ideas greatly appreciated.

 

I'm not familiar with Sata drives as far as where they need to be connected for booting, but after you disconnected the original, did you connect the new drive into the connector that the original was in?

 

With windows xp, you probably have a drive letter change problem. My advice is to verify that first before you check anything else.

Download the demo of "paragon justboot corrector" (unrar the file and use nero to burn the ISO ) now use that cd to boot up your computer. The demo will let you look at your non-booting hard drive registry and you will get an accurate readout of the system drive letters. The drive letter on your restored drive needs to be exactly the same as in your source drive.

This is something you can check quickly and either confirm as the problem or a nonfactor in your descrepency.

directions to change drive letters
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=174958

 

Thanks for helpful suggestions. I will give BootCorrector a go.

I can't believe that what seems to be a fairly common happening (ie getting a new hard drive, wishing it to be your boot drive and wishing to transfer over setup from old hard drive) actually seems quite a complex operation involving use of specialist software plus fundamental manual editing of the registry against dire warnings from Microsoft that this could make your system inoperable.

...Surely this is a sucker for a single stop solution but apparently not...

 

Hey dude,

Can you specify which version and build of atih do you use?

 

version 11 home

 

BlackHound,

Did you follow DwnNdrty's advice and plug the 500 GB HD into the SATA port previously used by the 250 GB HD?

That's a Hardware/BIOS error.

 

No

I didn't plug the new drive into the sata m/board connector of the old drive as BIOS only recognised the new drive after the old one was unplugged.

Do you think this might be helpful?

 

When you cloned, did you leave the new free space as is, or ask TI to adjust?

In theory S-ata drives shouldn't care what connector they are plugged into - but I did say in theory.


Colin

 

I did it proportional (i think...i'm not hugely familiar with the program).

I don't think sata drives care what connector they are plugged into but BIOS recognises which they are plugged into. In terms of making one the boot drive or the way Windows assigns drive letters, i would be surprised if it made a difference....but stand to be corrected...

 

If its version 11 please make sure thta you use build 8053.