Wanted - help with XP system disk replacement...........

[LvR]

XP SP1 and a gazillions things installed on a Maxtor 6y080mo disk hanging off a SATA controller on a Gigabyte G8ik1100 (875).

Want to replace the C: drive thats been sounding "rough" and appearing to "slow down" lately just as a precaution to prevent total disaster.

Ghost2003 goes through the motions of a successful clone, but new disk (Seagate ST3120026 SATA) is not bootable (hangs on a black screen)

OK - so they say if all else fail read the manual - did that and see Sysprep for XP SP1 must be run - Not a real propeller-head myself so find the intricacies of all the donts and dos mindboggling............

Help me please - anybody (MCSI ?) with experience that can speak plain English and detail steps to be taken to swap the Maxtor for the Seagate with the minimum amount of fuss

[VJ]

Can you boot from an XP CD and get into the recovery console ? If so, try fixboot and fixmbr (not sure in what order). This will force the XP CD to write a new MBR...

Alternatively, you could try creating bootfloppies using the installation on the Maxtor, swap harddisks and boot with the floppies. Chances are the bootdisks will try to repair the bootsector...


Jörg

[dbdg]

Just installed a SATA drive myself and forgot that I had to 'prepare' the disk, ended up using Seagates web program, don't have a floppy in my machine so couldn't use fdisk or whatever.

2k setup just bluescreen on me until I had prepared it then it was ok creating the partition.

[Maggi]

try this one

http://www.sysresccd.org/

use Partimage to draw a 1:1 copy and put it back onto the new disk

that way I moved a full blown XP installation from a Dell Inspiron 8100 P3 based notebook, over to a new Alienware Area51 P4 notebook

of course, I had to uninstall all devices prior to doing the image, but in your case that shouldn't be neccessary at all

[The PIT]

Funny I used Ghost 2003 to copy one ATA drive to SATA drive without a problems. You have got the bios setup right haven't you. Shouldn't need too use sysprep at all.

[LvR]

Well - so sick and tired of trying this damn excercise now that I am ready to turn into a ghost myself - no friggin way will Ghost2003 or Ghost 7.5 corporate clone this disk and leave it bootable afterwards.

At best I get the clone process complete and then when I remove the original disk to boot of the new one I am greeted by a message saying " cannot boot because C:\Windows\system32\system\config is corrupt or missing - try running setup from your original CD and select R on the first screen"....................... or something to that effect anyway...............

yeah right! - did that with the XP CD and you are dumped on the recovery console as expected, but what the hell am I supposed to do there??????????

Tried a fixboot - nada.

Anybody completed a SATA system disk replacement with XP?

[Maggi]

try this one

- boot your XP installation CD
- choose to install a new system

then it should detect your installed system and ask whether it should repair that one

if you choose that option over the first offer to repair an installation, it might work

Good Luck !

[LvR]

Thanks for the suggestion Maggi, but I tried that too, and iso doing the expected "repair" of a detected Windows installation (what is supposedly on the cloned disk already ) it only wants to do a new Windows installation in the same detected Windows folder (that it is not supposedly able to detect according to its earlier message) and then kindly warns me that all will be lost if thats done.

Really very logical this Windows thing

[Maggi]

gotta love XP ... not

[LvR]

Just had a local "XP boffin" suggest cloning to a common old IDE disk first, and then recloning that disk to the new SATA...............

Give that a try in a while - lunch and few beers I think is now going to be a much better idea.

Will post back later if things work out.

[LvR]

So in the end Ghost turned out crap every time - no matter what I did.

Gave up on the idea and resigned myself to the fact that I will have to reload all my software again, tackled a bottle of Jack Daniels, and immediately didn't feel so sorry for myself anymore.

3 days later, started searching the net for users who successfully accomplished this and bumped into XXClone (what a load of crap even though it works) and Casper XP - immediately turned into a happy-chappy again - never will I use anything else again.

This little app is amazing - it runs under Windows using all of the fancy drivers installed - it clones a disk at around 40M/s on this 875 chip-set of mine - absolutely no fuss at all - clone the disk while Windows is still running, shut down and change your boot-disk order and there you go booting off the new disk - sizes of partitions adjusted if you wanted and all software including NIS,Office XP etc etc etc that normally are rumored to have to be re-installed or fiddled with after a disk is replaced simply work as before - best of all Windows XP doesn't even seem to know what happened.

Tried it on all possible combinations of source and target disks on either SATA and IDE and also both SATA/SATA and IDE/IDE combinations - always works with no fuss.

Stop pulling your hair out next time and learn from my expensive saga here.

[DukeP]

That proggy really sounds nice!!

Thanks for giving this experience onwards.


~~DukeP~~


Oh, please dont drink Jack Daniels - theres so much better stuff out there.

[High_Jumbllama]

Does it make image files as well or does does it just copy from disc to disc? Hope it does.

[LvR]

Dedicated drive creation/cloning only - no images.

[HomeBrewer]

Don't know if this is related to your situation but it is VERY IMPORTANT TO REMOVE THE ORIGINAL DRIVE FOR AT LEAST THE FIRST TWO BOOTS.

For an explanation why.