Cloning Hard Drive

[postnetnc133]

My hard drive is running out of room so I cloned my old IDE hard drive to a newer larger SATA hard drive. I am running XP Pro and my motherboard has 2 built in sata ports. I cloned the drives using EZ Gig II which I used in the past doing IDE to IDE with no problems. After I cloned it I got the congratulations and powered down and tried booting from the new sata drive after I unhooked the ide drive. In the bios it recognizes the new drive and the size and the boot order which i have CD then floppy then hard drive in that order. After it goes through the boot and right before where it should show the XP logo I get a black screen with a flashing cursor and it just hangs there.

A friend told me to try flashing the bios which I did and it did the same thing.

Not sure if I am missing something in the BIOS.

I also tried doing a repair with the windows xp cd but got to the dos screen and didnt know what to do next.

Any thoughts?

[Joe]

Your boot sector is on the other drive. To fix it, try the FIXBOOT method shown here.

How to Repair the Boot Sector:
If XP won't start it may be due to a damaged boot sector or a missing or corrupt ntldr or ntdetect.com files.
To replace damaged ntldr and ntdetect.com you can copy fresh files from the XP CD using the COPY command. Boot with the XP CD and enter the Recovery Console (as above). At the Command Prompt type the following (where "X" is your CD-Rom drive letter) allowing the files to overwrite the old files
COPY X:\i386\NTLDR C:
COPY X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:

To repair a damaged Boot Sector at the command prompt type FIXBOOT and press Enter. Then answer "Y"

[otherthoughts]

My hard drive is running out of room so I cloned my old IDE hard drive to a newer larger SATA hard drive. I am running XP Pro and my motherboard has 2 built in sata ports. I cloned the drives using EZ Gig II which I used in the past doing IDE to IDE with no problems. After I cloned it I got the congratulations and powered down and tried booting from the new sata drive after I unhooked the ide drive. In the bios it recognizes the new drive and the size and the boot order which i have CD then floppy then hard drive in that order. After it goes through the boot and right before where it should show the XP logo I get a black screen with a flashing cursor and it just hangs there.

A friend told me to try flashing the bios which I did and it did the same thing.

Not sure if I am missing something in the BIOS.

I also tried doing a repair with the windows xp cd but got to the dos screen and didnt know what to do next.

Any thoughts?

Other options to look into, just in case “Joes” suggestions fail to work for you.

If there is a raid option in your BIOS settings, disable it.

Your drive types should also be set to a non AHCI mode in your BIOS settings(being that XP Pro would not have been installed on your original IDE(PATA) drive with the AHCI mode setting/drivers included because AHCI pertains to SATA drives).

Look for something along these lines in your BIOS,

Enhanced mode
Compatible Mode
IDE Mode

These settings should in essence make any SATA drives that your Mobo detects act like PATA(IDE) drives. Which brings us to the Master, Slave, CS(Cable Select) and Primary, Secondary issues raised with PATA/IDE drives. Which then begs the question, “How do I configure the Primary and Slave now that I have a SATA drive in the loop?”.

Good Question!
Some will have four SATA ports on their Mobo. Two will be considered Master(Primary/Secondary) and two will be considered Slave(Primary/Secondary).

The SATA Secondary ports live on the 40/80 ribbon cable PATA/IDE channel where their CD/DVD likely lives and may be set to Primary, Slave or CS via the jumper on their CD/DVD drive.

To finally sum up here, try moving your SATA drive cable into the other SATA port on your Mobo, which in effect changes it from Master to Slave or visa versa. Reboot after you change ports to test and determine which port is which.

The standard configuration is to make your Boot drive Primary/Master and then make sure your BIOS Boot Priority is set to boot the Primary/Master drive.

For what it's worth
OT