Hi - I stumbled across this thread after I found myself needing to move
my XP Pro install to a new HD (old drive was starting to make very bad
noises). I used the Western Digital software that came with the new
80gig HD to do a drive copy\clone from the old drive to the new drive -
and managed to break every rule listed in this thread regarding letting
the old OS see the new drive before copying, then letting the old OS
see the new OS after copying was complete, etc. When I removed the old
drive and put the new drive in as the primary/master I got an
"Operating System Not Found" error.
At this point I figured it may be a good idea to read some instructions
...and I found this thread. Nothing like doing your research after the
fact!
Since my old drive/OS was safely out of the computer I figured I could
experiment a little to try to get the cloned OS working. Worst case -
I'd just reformat the new drive, stick the old drive back in, and
follow the directions given here, or worst worst case - start from
scratch and do a clean install.
But first, I was intrigued by the possibility of using a Win98 boot
disk to help my system "forget" it's drive letter as suggested by "I'm
Dan". I popped the 98 boot disk in and followed the directions from
"I'm Dan" given much earlier in this thread by using "fdisk /mbr". I'm
not sure if that did the trick, but I also used fdisk on the 98 boot
disk to view the drive properties and discovered that it was reporting
no active partitions on the new HD. Still using the 98 boot disk
fdisk, I set the partition as active - ignoring the warnings that this
may render any existing partitions useless. After this I rebooted and
got a Win XP BSOD - but this was further along than before, so I was
not discouraged! Next I booted up using the XP CD and selected the
repair option, then followed more directions from
http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread/t-10428.html on repairing the
boot record. It say to first use "mkboot" but that command wasn't valid
in my XP list of commands so I went on to the next instruction to
"fixmbr" which worked fine, then I finished up with "bootcfg /rebuild"
After this I rebooted and the OS loaded up just fine and once it got up
and running XP found the new HD and installed it.
It has been up and running 48 hours without issues (knock on wood!) -
all drive letters are correct and all the programs I tested out run
fine.
Not sure if I could actually recreate this to work a second time but a
little experimenting saved hours of time doing a clean install!
xpismoved!
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