Al Smith wrote:

I have physical hard drive "C" with Win98 and physical hard drive "D"
with WinXP in a dual boot setup. I want to injstall a new, larger
physical hard drive "D". I have tried to follow the procedure for
cloning a drive using Norton Ghost. I disconnected the cables from "C"
and connected the new hard drive. (I set the new drive's jumper to
"master" the same as the "C" drive.) Then Norton Ghost was booted from
floppies and I cloned drive 2 to drive 1. This all seemed to OK. Then
I disconnected the new drive and changed the jumper to "slave". Then I
reconnected the "C" drive. Then I disconnected the "D" drive and
connected the new drive in it's place. Now when I boot to WinXP it
fails just after the WinXP splash screen. A blue screen with an error
message appears and the system reboots.

Any insight will be appreciated.

jimbo


Wow, confusing time trying to understand your procedure. You want to
clone your Windows XP drive, which is your D drive (not the boot drive)
to your new drive, which you want to install as C, right? So you can
boot up Windows XP, right?

Well, if you D drive is not your boot drive, Windows XP on it won't be
set up to boot as C, will it? It will be booting from the boot loader in
the boot partition on your C drive, with Windows 98. Unless I'm even
more confused than I think. ??? So when you clone the original D drive
(W XP) to your new, empty C drive, no wonder it won't boot.

If I read it right he's copying the old slave to the new drive and then
putting the new drive in as slave, replacing the old one, with the new
drive's temporary life as 'master' only for the copy process. The 'idea' is
ok but I'm not so sure the implementation of it is 'ok'.

Bad form to call them C and D, though, because that assumes how XP assigned
the letters and it isn't the same as Win9x. Plus, once serialized, XP knows
which one is which even if you move them to different IDE locations.

That can be a real 'gotcha' if you intend to clone an old drive to a new
one and still use the old one as a second, storage, drive. One might think
you could simply move the old drive to slave (gonna be 'D', you THINK),
install new drive as master (gonna be 'D', you THINK), clone old to new,
and boot 'er up on the new 'C' (you THINK) drive. However, if you DO it
that way it'll boot from the master BUT as soon as XP awakens it'll assign
the new drive to 'D' (or some other letter, depending on configuration)
because 'C' is still there (IDE slave notwithstanding) and merrily finish
loading up from the old drive, and operate FROM the old drive, because the
OLD DRIVE IS still C even though its the slave and you THINK its 'D'.

You need to REMOVE the old drive so that, when XP discovers the new one,
'C' is unused and XP can assign 'C' to the new drive.

I suspect there's some 'drive letter' confusion in his cloned copy but I
can't quite place my finger on it.