Drive Backup 8.5: Copied Drive doesn't boot.

I'm wanting to replace an older 500GB SATA hard drive with a newer one on my WinXP32 system.

I've hooked up both drives, booted from my Drive Backup 8.5 CD, and selected Copy Drive, copying my old drive to my new drive. (This took several hours.)

When finished, I shut down, disconnect the old drive, remove the CD, and boot. I get a black screen with a white blinking underscore in the upper left hand corner and nothing else happens.

I boot again off the Drive Backup CD and use Boot Corrector to look for Windows systems and it finds it no problem with both S and B parameters, (System, and Bootable) and try the Boot Sector corrector, with no change.

I still have my original drive, which still boots fine. I've tried the Disk Copy twice now with the same results. Am I missing something? I don't recall ever having a problem with Paragon Drive Backup before.

 

Try connecting the new copied drive to the same SATA port that the old drive was connected to.

 

No change in behavior. Also, outside of having a bad SATA port, I'm not sure how moving a boot drive to a different [working] SATA port would normally pose any problem for a WinXP box. I can, for example, move the [working] boot drive to any other SATA port and still boot the computer. But nevertheless, I tried your advice and the problem did not change.

 

Sometimes, a "Hard Disk Boot Priority" is set on the BIOS. This selects a specific SATA port as the normal boot port. To boot from other SATA port, this setting must be changed, or the disk must be connected to the default boot SATA port.

A recommended procedure to copy a disk and then boot from it in XP is to do a "reverse copy". This means, interchange the disks before doing the copy, and after the copy don´t let Windows "see" the two disks. Disconnect the old one before the first boot.