XP hangs on Windows screen

I am trying to clone from a Maxtor IDE ATA 80 Gb drive to a Seagate SATA 160GB with TI8. It tells me it has to reboot for system disks so I do that and then on startup I see TI in action going through all its parts and then tells me that "Congratulations you have sucessfully....." Hit any key to shut down. Which I do then and then I unhook the old drive and change the BIOS to boot from the new drive. XP starts up but it hangs on the XP Logo screen, sometime it goes past and will show the logon box but then it gets into a loop of logging off and logging in. But most of the time it just hangs on the logo. I have tried the automatic and manually partitions. Any idea what can cause it? I even disabled the swap file.

Frustrtaed being trying to do it for 2 days now!

 

This, I believe, is a variation of the old seenthatdiskb4 senario. To get out of it, you must zero fill the sata drive using the drive vendor's utility or fdisk /mbr using a dos boot disk before cloning again. After this, don't boot Windows. Boot from the True Image CD and do the clone, shut down and remove the old disk then boot from the sata drive. Another option, if you happen to have Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro, is to boot from it and choose the "Fix Boot" then choose "Fix Drive Letter in Registry". this can fix the existing cloned sata drive that is now screwed up.

 

Thanks. I will give it a shot. I have found similar advice at Symantec's site
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPOR...rc=hot&prod=Norton Ghost&ver=9.0&csm=no&tpre=

I also have to say that when I installed the SATA drive, I used Seagate's DiscWizard that comes with the installation CD. It asked me if I want to copy one drive to another. I thought yes seeing that it is their utility and their drive it should be fine. Well it took very longggggggggggg until I decided to abort the operation. Maybe that is where the MBR got screwed up.

Thanks again I will let ya know if it worked.

 

OK that did it - now I did not try to use the Acronis boot CD without doing the fdisk /MBR so maybe it would have completed successfully if I did that too but anyway I booted with DOS 6.2 (LOL good old DOS) and did the fdisk /MBR and then booted of the Acronis CD. I cloned the disk and then removed the "old" disk and changed the BIOS to bootup from the new SATA drive. Walla worked well. Added note : the cloning process took over 2 hours - kind of long but it worked.

Thanks for your advice beenthereb4 - now I can say ihavebeenthere2

 

Thanks for posting back, so often we never hear what happened! Strictly speaking, the dos fdisk /mbr should have made the sata drive boot, but by redoing the clone, you have an almost surefire fix.