Transferring WinXP to a new HD...

[Evan]

Hello, to the point...

I bought a new larger HD. I partitioned it, formatted, and transfered my data onto it, leaving the first partition blank for the OS. I have Windows XP installed on the 1st partition of my old HD and I wanted to transfer it as-is to the new HD.

I booted from an acronis true image CD, made an image of my old Windows XP partition, and transfered it to the new one (the 1st on the new HD). The new partition is larger in size but acronis did not complain and all seemed to go well. Then, I disconnected my old HD and connected the new one to the same SATA cable (to avoid any potential device ID mismatches) and went on to boot into Windows.

This was the "cleanest" way I could think of of doing this... but it failed to work. Windows freezes in the Log-on prompt. I have installed Recovery Console as well and it appears as an option in the windows boot menu. That also fails to load (freezes). Safe mode freezes too. And I have a sysinternals registry defragmentation tool running on every windows boot... it gives me an error message about paths and something about "registry not found"... so that's the only error message I can use as a guide.

I have not changed any other devices in the system. I have not added an extra HD, I simply replaced the old one with the new one, on the same location, same SATA cable. How could paths have changed? Are drive letters embedded into the HDs themselves or does windows assign them at runtime?

I am very confused and I would appreciate any insight and any suggestions on how to go about doing this OS transfer... or I am gonna have to do a complete reinstall (a week of total pain and agony)

Thanks in advance!

[Evan]

*SOLVED*

I have given explicit drive letters to all partitions in my system from XP's Disk Management. (Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management).

Windows apparently stores and remembers the letter assignments for each disk/partition. When I first attached the new HD to partition and format it, I did so from my old windows installation. Then I somehow assigned specific drive letters to it. When I tried to boot from it, windows remembered those drive letters and the first partition was getting a letter different than the default C.

The solution...

Before imaging my old partition, I made sure to remove all drive letter assignments for all drives (except the boot drive which is assigned automatically by Windows) from the Disk Management panel. After I make the transfers and boot succesfully from the new HD. I can then reassign the letters as I wish.

I hope this helps people with similar problems as mine.