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Help! Hard drive won't boot after cloning

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by dohati, Jan 16, 2006.

  1. dohati

    dohati Member

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    hi, hopefully one of you can help, i'm trying to upgrade my current hard drive, a ide maxtor, to larger sata hitachi. i don't want to reinstall everything and was trying to use norton ghost to clone the drive. after cloning, the computer won't boot up from the sata, it says something like non boot error, please insert system boot disk and press enter (similiar to that, going off memory).

    i can boot up using the ide maxtor and can see and access the sata after windows has booted. i read somewhere that in order to boot, the operating system has to see the new drive as C: but when i go into computer management i can't change the new drive to C:, its currently like G:. using windows xp. any help would be appreciated.
     
  2. Darkhadou

    Darkhadou Regular member

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    When using Norton Ghost did you create a backup disk? usually on floppy or CD, that's what it is asking for I believe.
     
  3. SypherTek

    SypherTek Guest

    in order for a sata drive to boot it needs the sata controller driver to be built into the windows installation. if youve cloned from an ide it may not have this.

    you could try booting up the pc with the windows disk in,
    press f6 when the installation is loading (this is to specify additional devices i.e your sata drive) youll need to download your motherboards SATA diskette to load the sata driver so that xp setup can see the hard drive. when youve loaded the sata driver continue with the setup until it asks if you want to repair a windows installation. choose to repair the installation on the sata drive.

    when you are in the recovery console type FIXMBR and hit enter this will fix the master boot record for the hard drive.

    when youve done that try to boot from it again (making sure that your ide hd isnt plugged in) if you still have no luck you may just have to install windows onto the drive rather than using the clone
     
  4. dohati

    dohati Member

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    tried your suggestion SypherTek, still not loading. i did a search on how to make a SATA driver boot disk and found that i had to use the cd that came with the mobo (A8N-SLI) while booting the computer. did that and got some options, picked "Make Sil3114 SATA/RAID 32bit Driver Disk" on a floppy.

    then rebooted with winxp cd in drive and hit f6 and uploaded the driver disk. after that finished continued with winxp installation until i got the choice of hitting "R" for a repair installation. hit that then got the choice of which drive to use. first when i had both hard drives connected i had a c: and a d: so i figured d: must be the SATA, picked it and then did FIXMBR and restarted but still got the error Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk and Press enter.

    i thought maybe i picked the wrong drive so i cloned the hard drive again, unplugged the IDE drive and did the same thing and since there was only one drive attached, i thought it had to be this one so picked c:. did the FIXMBR and got the same result, Disk Boot Failure. did i do something wrong or is this just not working. please help any other suggestions would be appreciated.
     
    Last edited: Jan 16, 2006
  5. dohati

    dohati Member

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    i was browsing the technical help areas of norton's website and found this, does anyone know how to implement it?


    Situation:

    You have cloned the first partition from one hard drive to another, and now the destination drive is not bootable.

    Solution:
    This normally means that the destination partition has not been set to active. It must be set to active in order to be bootable. Depending on what purpose the drive served before the cloning occurred, you may also need to reinitialize the Master Boot Record (MBR). To set a partition to active and reinitialize the MBR, you can either use FDISK, or you can use the following GDISK commands


    GDISK 1 /act /p:1 Sets the first partition on drive 1 to active.
    GDISK 1 /MBR Reinitializes the Master Boot Record on drive 1.

    NOTE: Although reinitializing (writing over) the MBR does not alter the disk's partition information, it can be destructive if other software has written information into the MBR. Typical programs that use space in the MBR include drive translation software such as OnTrack's Disk Manager, or a boot manager such as OS/2's Boot Manager. These types of utility programs are known by various names, such as disk extender, drive overlay, and operating system loader.


    how do you use GDISK? i did a search and its some norton program, i have norton system works installed but can't seem to find GDISK. did i already do this by doing the FIXMBR described in my earlier post?
     
    Last edited: Jan 16, 2006
  6. dohati

    dohati Member

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  7. Xian

    Xian Regular member

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    You should be able to set the active partition with fdisk as well. A partition has to be active to be bootable.
     
  8. dohati

    dohati Member

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    i used fdisk to set partition 1 on the SATA drive as active and tried to reboot and instead of getting a disk boot failure message, got error loading operating system failure. :(
     
  9. Xian

    Xian Regular member

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    Error loading operating system could mean that the boot.ini is not correct. That's what points to where your system partition is located and ntldr
    http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmc_str_masc.asp

    Make sure the parameters for the ARC path in boot.ini are correct. What I am suspecting is that parameter "W" in the example in the link above is incorrect since you are now on a SATA controller.
     

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