TI - Cloned drive - but Repair Install fails

Hi.

Athlon 64 3400+, 1gB RAM, 500gB HDD, Abit M/B. I've cloned my 160gB SATA HDD to a new 500gB SATA HDD using TI 9.0 Workstation by connecting the two via SATA. Both drives recognized inside Windows XP Pro. I used the Seagate Disk Wizard Utility to introduce and prep the new drive. TI went through without complaint. Swapped them at the connectors on the mobo. Thought I had it knocked. However when I go to backup the new drive, I'm getting Bad_Pool_Header stop code 19. Never had this with the old drive. So I'm attempted a Repair Install using my WinXP CD media. The mini-Windows environment starts up fine, but then it tells me it can't find any HDD attached to my system!!! What? It boots up fine, reads and writes to the new drive, shows all files/folders in Explorer, etc. etc. Luckily I haven't put much on the new drive since I had this problem right away.

Is there something in the mysterious SATA setup business I should have done beforehand? That's the only thing I can think of at this point. Is there any way to recover from this mini-disaster?

 

whftherb,

Did you let the new HD boot on its own (old HD disconnected) before you re-connected the old HD to the mobo? You can get drive letter issues if you let the new HD boot with both HDs connected.

 

Hello -

Yes I did exactly that. I said "swapped" and I really meant "pulled out old, stuck in new". The old drive was failing and I knew that so who needs it. The new drive is listed as C:\. And in BIOS it is also recognized.

To get rid of the BSOD, as I said, I'm now trying to do an XP Repair Install to see if that clears whatever problem this thing is having. But, in a comedy of errors, XP Repair won't see the new drive because...
- No SATA support on the XP install media - HOW NICE!
- And no Floppy drive - even nicer....
- And the floppy that came with the Mobo is not working so I can't get any of the needed support files into position for a repair from it. Those drivers appear to be old anyway.
- And I went to the Abit site to download the SATA drivers. Those are now on the HDD. Boy, what a hassle!

So now I have to figure out how to combine (slipstream) the SATA drivers onto a copy of the XP install media. Then I have to hope somehow that, when it's booting, an F6 will branch out & allow me to access them on the slipstream. So, there's more trial and error ahead. I don't hold out much hope at this point. This whole project has been a "disaster"...

The old drive, though failing (making a ticking noise on writes sporadically) was still operating. Wish I knew why the clone didn't work properly.

No wonder people don't like computers...

{sigh}

Thanks for the reply.

 

whftherb:

Your frustration with SATA drivers and floppies is one of the reasons that Microsoft designed Vista to be able to load drivers from a USB flash drive. The XP CDs are several years old now and do not have recent SATA drivers.

Another workaround is to look through the BIOS menus on your PC to see if you have a setting for an "IDE Compatibility Mode". If so, switch to this mode and the XP CD will then be able to see your disk. After you get Windows working, download (or find via Windows Update) the correct SATA driver and install it. Then switch the setting in the BIOS back.

 

Mark (et al) Let me ask just one more question, please-
When you said: After you get Windows working, download (or find via Windows Update) the correct SATA driver and install it....

Windows XP (and BIOS as well) already sees the SATA disk which tells me the SATA drivers are already in place on it and working. They just don't work when XP boots from the generic XP install media. I don't see why, at the end of the repair install and if it cures the ill, I would have to go load new drivers. I agree that I'd have to switch out of Compatibility Mode (something I haven't seen to yet) but the SATA drivers should be cloned over from that old drive. No?

 

That sounds correct - I missed that point in your original post.

 

That was your mistake. Windows puts a disk signature in the MBR. This causes problems on boot. If you had just let TI deal with a blank new hard drive, it may have all worked. You can try again by writing all zeros to the new drive with the Seagate utility.This may be called low level formatting. Then clone again.

 

Mr

Ahh! So that was it! And here's more of what I've just discovered within the last 12 hours. The BSOD is directly related to the Volume Shadow Copy (VSC) service. I stumbled upon this as I attempted another quick backup of two small files with the XP native backup util (while carefully watching the screen). Once I saw the VSC being called by the backup util and immediately dump out, I knew I'd found it. I then turned of VSC in the commercial backup app I normally use and got a full backup last evening for the first time in 10 days of dealing with this. I'm content that I found the cause (instead of just guessing).

I wonder, and maybe you folks can comment, if using Disk Wizard and imbedding the dreaded "disk signature" as mustang points out is the deeper root cause of the VSC problem and Bad_Pool_Header issue? Sems like it might. I could probably re-clone because while this system has been "sick" I've put very little on it. The old disk is still readable (and it's headed for the trash bin). But first I guess I'd need to clean it off entirely according to what I just read and just use TI, right? Let's also remember that this is SATA-land and thus I'm assuming that TI will be able to recognize the cleaned off new drive as it did before. That's logical. What do you all think? And if so, I stand a good chance of the clone now being able to use VSC, so that I'm really back to where I wanted to be in the first place, right?

 

I had a similar issue. See this blog post http://www.frankhagan.com/blog/2008/01/26/bad_pool_header-due-to-mbr-issue/ which seems to describe what's going on. I applied the "fix" and it's worked.