PC Hard Disk question..?

[Adrian Brentnall]

HI Folks Kinda DIY - as I'm trying to do it myself ....

Have 'successfully' cloned my old winxp c: drive to a new (1 terabyte) drive - using some free s/w XXCLONE.

Nearly all is good, though it took a long time...

Only problem now is that the new drive won't boot on its own. Under a dual-boot setup I can 'make' it boot manually, but if only the new drive is installed in the PC then it wont boot - just hangs with a flashing cursor.

Seems that the new drive is set up as a logical partition, not as a primary partition - thinking that could be the problem ..?

So - does anybody know of an easy (ideally free!) way to change logical partitions into primary partitions..? I've already considered "angle-grinder"!

Thanks

[Reentrant]

terabyte)

flashing

Gparted will do that. You need the "live CD" version.

[The Natural Philosopher]

a thought. Is the new disk in the primary place the BIOS expects to find as a bootable disk?

Is the boot loader installed on it?

It is possible that the atual squence you have set up is that

BIOS looks at original boot disk, loads boot loader. boot loader on first disk is now configured to boot from second disk

and that is what you mean by 'manual booting' But no boot loader exists at all on the second disk.

Or the bios is not set to boot from a disk in that position.

IIRC a primary partition is one with space reserved at the start for a boot loader.

I would if I were you:

first check the BIOS to see what the boot order is

if that seems to be correct then reclone the disk - possibly using something more robust.

If you can bear to type things, here is a Linux live CD used to create, format and stick the boot record on a new disk, and then copy the whole existing installation (warts and all) using DD, and finally to resize the new installation so that its as big as the disk, not as big as the old installation was.

As a linux user, that's what I would use.

dd'ing the first 446 bytes of the old drive is the key to smacking the bootloader on the new disk. And setting te boot flag and type

the partition resizing i f your don't have gui tools is a bit arcane. Parted is not that user friendly.

[John Rumm]

I think this may be a case of not wanting to start from here...

Grab yourself a copy of Maxblast[1] (seagate web site), and have that do a clone of the drive - that will produce a perfect copy - scaled to the size of the new drive and also with the same partition type and layout.

[1] Its basically a copy of Acronis True Image limited to work on seagate and maxtor drives. So ideally you need at least one of them on your system. However if you don't have one, boot it as normal, then when you get the error popup telling you it can't find a seagate or maxtor drive, hold down ALT and key TO (for Technical Override)

[Martin Brown]

Tools like Partition Magic will let you transmute disk partition configurations with data in place and a relatively low risk of data loss

- but you should back up anything you care about first.

Could it be that the old disk was formatted FAT32 and new one is NTFS?

[Adrian Brentnall]

Yes - tried telling it that -but it just sits & sulks on boot if only the new disk is present.

Probably not - though it's showing 'healthy(boot)' in XP disk management, while the old drive (that does boot) shows up as 'healthy(system)'

Yes - very possible. The xxclone software has a tool that updated boot.ini (on the original disk) to suggest multiple boot disk option - and this is how I've managed to boot up and run the new hard disk.

I think I've got that bit right. When it fails to boot (when just the new disk is present)it's visible in the bios, but just won't boot from it

the bois doesn't seem to be specific about 'which' hdd to boot from - so the order is cd.. hdd..

I was happy enough with the cloning process (except for the booting bit!) I tried Arconis, which wouldn't even install, plus a few others. Apparently Ghost is no longer being sold.

I was raised on command line interfaces - but was hoping for a 'load this software and click this button' solution - getting lazy in my old age!

Clonezilla seems to automate the process, and makes specific reference to making the new disk bootable (which seems to be the bit that I'm missing with my current setup). Bit of an annoyance, as last night's clone operation took best part of 5 hours....

Thanks Adrian

[Adrian Brentnall]

I was afraid that might be the answer!

Hmm - it was one of the Acronis 'bought' offerings that I started with - it refused to run at all, their online support was less use than a chocolate teapot, and I actually managed to get a refund from Paypal!

Still - I might give it a try, if PartitionMagic or similar doesn't do the trick...

It was so much easier back in the old days when you simply swapped the platter on the 10Mb drive, formatted it and then fed it 3 floppy disks to reinstall dos! Happy days Thanks

[Ivan Dobsky]

In addition to all the above helpful info...

It might help to run msconfig from the start/run menu. Click on the boot.ini tab, and make sure that XP is actually in the boot.ini file.

Could also help to look at some of the videos on youtube that shown how to recreate the mbr.

[The Other Mike]

Seagate discwizard is the same iirc, certainly does the resizing and is based on True Image

[Adrian Brentnall]

Hmmm...

I took a look - and got the message

'it appears that the following line in the BOOT.INI file does not refer to a valid operating system:

"multi(0)disk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP (new xp drive)

931.5GiB" /fastetect/NoExecute=OptIn"

Would you like to remove it from the BOOT.INI file?

This is on the current C: drive (the newly cloned one) that will only boot via a multi-boot option on the other (old) drive that's also in this pc..

What's msconfig trying to tell me ? And what should I do about it ?

OK - will take a look there - thanks

Adrian

[Andy Burns]

That the partition layout on the original and copied disks aren't identical, so the boot.ini isn't correct for the disk it's now on.

[Ivan Dobsky]

It could be that cloning the drive created an exact copy of the boot.ini file (not surprising), but the path to the windows OS contained in that boot.ini file is no longer valid.

See if reading about the MULTI(X) syntax here helps:

[Ivan Dobsky]

Sorry, I should have expanded on that. I'd guess that you need to change some of the numbers here: multi(0)disk(0)partition(1)

which you can do in sysedit (or just notepad), and then try to revalidate in msconfig.

[Adrian Brentnall]

Looking in Windows 'computer management | disk management'

I get this

Guessing here - does the BOOT.INI need to refer to partition(0) on the new drive... do you think ?

Many thanks

[Adrian Brentnall]

Just to follow up - here's the BOOT.INI from the original hard drive.

[boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP (new xp drive) 931.50 GiB" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

In order to boot the system, I have to go though the multiboot option on the old hard drive - so I think that the line in the BOOT.INI on the new hard drive should read the same as the 2nd option line in the old BOOT.INI - does that make sense ?

So should it look like this ?

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP (new xp drive) 931.50 GiB" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

the difference being the rdisk(1).... All greek to me, I'm afraid! TIA

[Ivan Dobsky]

There is usually also an rdisk() value in there. It may be optional if you have only one disk on the adapter, but if there are several, you may need to say which number it is. Try changing it to this in Notepad

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)

and see if if it will validate in msconfig. If not, try

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)

etc.

[Ivan Dobsky]

Like I say, have a blimp at this:

If you now have an extra drive in the box, it could be that none of the original combinations:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2) multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)

are now valid. It depends where and how you attached the drive.

[John Rumm]

Yup same thing. There is also a Western Digital version for folks with WD drives.

[The Natural Philosopher]

TBH you can still do that, and then copy the old disk over.

That is essentially how I clone linux - back up the old s**te as files, then reinstall from scratch and whack the new disk with as much of the old data as I need.

[The Natural Philosopher]

yes.

I think making the new drive 'system' is what you want..