Windows Switching hard drives???

ok, so i bought a new hard drive. Western digital 40 gig. I currently have one just like it but it is noisy and i believe on its last leg. I used WD's utilities to make a drive to drive copy. I then put the new drive in the pace of the old one, set it as master,. but when I power it on, it says ERROR LOADING OS! What gives? It is supposedly an exact copy of the original drive. So why wont it boot? I need help please!

Thanks,
Randy

 

depending on the OS you may have to boot off a floppy or CD and do an fdisk /mbr at a dos/command line prompt

either that or use norton ghost instead of the WD copy thing

 

sorry, posted in a hurry. It's XP home. explain further about the floppy disk...also is there a trial of ghost?

 

ok, i'm familiar with the procedure with win2k, it should be the same or very similar with xp. boot from the cdrom, when it asks if you want to install or recover, go recover, then go to a recovery console

from the recovery console (after typing the admin password, i believe) just type

Code:

 fdisk /mbr 

and reboot the computer (Remember to eject the cd)

as for ghost, i don't believe there are any free trials but you can try www.symantec.com (makers of norton stuff)

hope that helps, otherwise i'll have to bow to someone else's experience with xp

 

Ok, I think I got it.....there was an option I missed "set as new boot device and include the boot partition in the copy"

let's see.........

 

heh, always something small that's the most annoying

hopefully that's it, good luck

 

Still not working!!!!! fdisk is not recognized....tried fixboot and fixmbr to no avail....I dont get it

 

afaik, fdisk /mbr makes the primary fat32 partition bootable. so if the primary partition isnt fat32 then it wont work.

 

I cannot for the life of me figure this out!!!! I defragged the original, tried it again, the program says it was successful, and the drive info says it's bootable. Does it have something to do with the naming of the drive in windows? I cant find the answer anywhere!

 

What do you mean its not recognised? If it cant find the command at all it might be because DOS is case sensitive... Try Fdisk or FDISK instead.

Sam

 

easiest way is to use norton ghost to duplicate the drive and use the "image boot" option..

fdisk /mbr should work from a bootdisk or recovery console too.

If you still have the other drive in you may have to edit your boot.ini also.

-Mike