Cloned 240 GB SSD to 500 GB SSD - XP now crashes during boot

[Nomen]

This may not be an XP-related problem, but because the computer being used is running XP I'm posting this here.

A few years ago I cloned what I think was an 80 gb drive to a 240 gb SSD drive.  The 80 gb drive was partitioned as 24 gb FAT (C drive) and the remainder as NTFS (D drive).  The C drive had XP-pro, sp3.  The motherboard in question is Gigabyte, exact model escapes me at the moment, it is AMD (AM2 or AM3 CPU), 6 SATA ports, 2 IDE ports.  Relatively modern motherboard (maybe 5 years old?).  This belongs to a relative of mine, not local to where I am.

I was recently visiting, brought a new 500 gb WD Blue SSD.  Used Norton Ghost 2003 to clone the 240 GB SSD to the new drive.  Ghost resized the C partition to 44 or 48 gb (ie - doubled the size).  The original C drive (FAT32) was using 16kb cluster size.  Offhand I don't know if that was maintained or not in the new cloned drive.

Anyways, after the clone (which was performed really fast, at 3200 mb/min) I placed the new drive in position in place of the old drive, then tried to boot the system into XP.  The XP splash screen appears, with the moving / sliding indicator which moves back and forth a few times, then a barely visible blue or black-screen error message is flashed before the system crashes and reboots.

Upon restart, I get the usual screen (windows didn't start, how do you want to start this time, safe mode, normal, etc).  No matter what I try, I get the same crash and restart.  The safe mode startup scrolls a list of files being loaded, and always craps out at the same file (which right now I can't recall what that was). Presumably the crash happens when XP switches into 32-bit mode during bootup and stops accessing the drive using INT13 bios routines?

Here's the wierd part.

If I boot the original drive, and connect this new drive to a different SATA port, the system boots fine into XP, but in disk management the new drive is completely absent.  Detect new hardware does nothing.  In the bios, when I select boot device, the bios sees both drives just fine.  If I swap the SATA ports the drives are connected to, and I still boot the old drive, XP still can't see the new drive.

If I boot DOS with a floppy, I can see both drives (at least the FAT32 partition) on both drives.  

Bios is set the SATA ports as native (not IDE).

I have the new drive with me, so what I plan to do next is connect the drive to another XP machine that I have with SATA ports and see if the drive is visible / accessible on another machine (with different motherboard).  I can also connect it to a win-98 machine with SATA controller, and (as last resort) can connect it to win-7 machine.  

So based on what I've seen so far, it seems that there is a hardware incompatibility between the new drive and SATA controller that renders the drive invisible under XP.  Now whether this incompatibility is caused by how the drive has been formatted (ie the ghost clone and the FAT32/NTFS combination of the original source drive) or if it is something at lower hardware level, I don't know.

Anyone got any ideas or comments?

[rloew]

When both drives are present, is the second drive truly absent or is it disabled?

[jaclaz]

Well, about the first part of the report, if you  - at any time - had both the hard disks connected when booting XP, one of the two will have had its Disk Signature automatically changed.

The one with the original Disk Signature will boot normally, the one with the changed one won't (stopping/BSODding at the time the drive letter is needed/assigned).

This problem can be solved by modifying a couple entries in the Registry "MountedDevices".

The second part is puzzling.

Still, it could be connected to the first part.

You need anyway to check the Disk Signature and the corresponding Registry entries on both drives, if the "install" volume is FAT/FAT32 you can use DOS and good ol'Registry Viewer (which is also an Editor) from DOS:

http://paullee.ru/regstry.html

jaclaz

 

[Nomen]

4 hours ago, rloew said:

When both drives are present, is the second drive truly absent or is it disabled?

When the system has booted into XP using the original 240 gb drive as the boot drive, the new 500 gb drive is totally absent in disk management.  I even quickly downloaded and installed WD data life-guard for windows and ran it, and it does not find or present the new drive to me.  And to reply to jaclaz, my first few attempts to boot the system with the new 500 gb drive were with that drive as the only drive connected to the system.