Hard Drive Cloning

[hougtimo]

Hi,

I have a client's pc here (amd 550mhz, 256mb ram, 12gb hdd) and he wants me to replace the 12gb hard drive with an 80gb. Both drives are IDE and work no problems.

I tried to clone the 12gb to the 80gb drive using Acronis Trueimage...everything went smoothly (although it took 3-4hrs to copy 8gb data). So whern it was finished, I took out the old hard drive, set the new one as master..turned on, got asfar as the XP bootscreen and BSOD. Not a proper one though, no error code just a blue screen with something about %systemroot%/system32/ntdll.dll in white writing at the top. #

So, not to be deterred, I formatted the 80gb drive and tried again using Partition Magic, again everything went fine but when I try to boot the computer claims that there is no boot device installed. I tried to set the 80gb drive as "active" in XP, but that option didn't show up on the menu like ti usually does.

Help!!!!!! What do I try next?

HougTimo

[nitroshift]

I would make a 12 GB partition on the new drive and clone the old HDD onto the new partition. But that's only my 2 cents...

[jaclaz]

Something appears to be wrong, copying 8 Gb should take several minutes, not hours.

I would try with one of these (FREEWARE):

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

http://www.pcinspector.de/clone-maxx/uk/welcome.htm

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/index.htm

jaclaz

Edited March 12, 2007 by jaclaz

[hougtimo]

well, everything seems to have copied correctly, and I can now boot in safe mode... However when I try a normal boot, I get a BSOD with the error "Unmountable Boot Device" - anyone have any ideas what this means?

[jaclaz]

Does this happen with the old disk still in, or with ONLY the new one connected?

If it is the first one, it may be a conflict of the disk signature, or it could well be something related to WPA, is it XP?

Your next best bet is to do a REPAIR, along these intructions:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

jaclaz