Cloning WinXP onto Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA hard disk (TI ver. 9 build 3.854)

Greetings everybody!

I recently wanted to clone my existing (perfectly working) Windows XP Home boot hard disk onto a brand new 320 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA drive, model ST3320620AS. The existing boot C-disk is a 250 GB Western Digital SATA, which is in my Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P (the CPU being an AMD Athlon 64 3700+). The motherboard is an ASUS A8NE-FM with the SATA interface being a NVIDIA nForce4 Serial ATA Controller.

I struggled quite a bit getting the cloned Seagate SATA disk to work as a Windows XP boot drive, but eventually got it working – using Acronis True Image Home version 9, build 3.854. Here’s how I eventually succeeded – hope it may be useful to others!

1) First mounted the Seagate ST3320620AS as the D-drive (the C-drive being the Western Digital boot drive). Kept Seagate factory-default jumper setting (“Limit data transfer rate to 1.5 Gbits per second “). Booted up, went into the BIOS (being Nvidia 42302e31 Phoenix AwardBIOS v6.00PG according to ”System Info for Windows” from http://www.gtopala.com/), and configured the Seagate drive as follows: Second Master SATA HDD, Extended IDE Drive: Auto, Access Mode: Large (NB: Do NOT select ”Auto” here!!), Capacity: 320 GB, Cylinder: 4095, Head: 240, Precomp: 0, Landing Zone: 65534, Sector: 255. Save configuration and exit BIOS.

2) Booted up on the old Western Digital C-drive. Used Seagate’s DiscWizard to format and partition the ST3320620AS (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard). The drive was formatted NTFS (4k block size, and one single partition). This went smooth (Windows XP however complained of some of the Seagate drivers not being ”WHQL certified” – just continued, anyway). Then right-clicked on ”My Computer" --> "Manage" --> ”Computer Management” --> ”Disk Management”. Right-clicked on the Seagate disk, then clicked ”Mark Partition as Active”. The Seagate drive is now seen in Windows as drive D, and is ready for use.

3) Ran Acronis True Image Home ver. 9, build 3.854 and cloned the Western Digital disk onto the Seagate. This went smooth and took less than five minutes (data amount on the Western Digital C-drive, containing Windows XP Home, \Program Files, \Documents and Settings and not much else, being approx. 10 GB). Impressing fast cloning! Exit and shut-down.

4) Removed the Western Digital drive from the PC, keeping only the new Seagate disk. Booted, went into BIOS, configured the boot drive as the Seagate: First or Second Master SATA HDD (according to what SATA cable is being used), Extended IDE Drive: Auto, Access Mode: Large (NB: Do NOT select ”Auto” here!!), Capacity: 320 GB, Cylinder: 4095, Head: 240, Precomp: 0, Landing Zone: 65534, Sector: 255. Save and exit BIOS.

5) Booted into Windows XP Home on the newly cloned Seagate SATA drive. Success!! End of story!

NOTE the there seems to be an error in some of the ASUS motherboards (or in the BIOS?), incl. the A8NE-FM, which makes it impossible to boot from an apparently successfully Windows XP cloned Seagate SATA drive unless first having set the ”Access Mode” in the BIOS to ”Large” before formatting and cloning. Some also claim that NCQ for the Seagate drive must be disabled; I have not done this and the cloned drive boots and works perfectly with NCQ enabled. (NB: If not setting ”Access Mode” to ”Large”, but if keeping the default BIOS setting of ”Auto”, then it is perfectly possible to both format, partition, set active and clone onto the drive. When attempting to boot using the cloned drive one gets this message: ”Error loading operating system” (or in Danish: ”Fejl ved indlæsning af operativsystem”). Further links discussing this issue:

SATA boot problem: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...board_id=1&model=A8N-E&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

Cannot boot from SATA drive: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...board_id=1&model=A8N-E&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

Problem with installing XP on 320 GB HDD: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...board_id=1&model=A8N-E&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

Seagate SATAII disk unable to boot: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...board_id=1&model=A8N-E&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

A8N-E, SATA and XP Professional Installation: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...board_id=1&model=A8N-E&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

Best regards,

Johan
Copenhagen
Denmark

 

I'm curious to know if you had set the boot order in the Bios to

1. Floppy (if any)
2. CD Rom
3. Hdd 0
4. Hdd 1
5. Any Other Boot Device

Would there be the need to go back into the Bios, once you remove the WD drive, to make the system boot from the Seagate, leaving the Seagate where it was when cloned.