Would someone please take a minute to tell me what I am doing wrong here. I am helping someone with their six year old Dell with a 30 gig drive that is almost full. I have spent hours trying to move that data to a 320 gig to replace the 30 gig, but the new drive will not boot. I used Norton to backup the data to the new drive, then I restored the data on the new drive. Everything seems to be there. When I pulled out the old drive and moved the new drive to first plug on the IDE ribbon to see if it would boot and operate, I got NTLDR missing. I put the new drive back in and copied the entire i386 folder onto the new drive, fixing that problem, but now, it stops with some long message about the path or hardware configuration. I looked on the new drive, which is E:, to see if everything was really there, and it had everything in folder called c. So, I copied all of that so the i386 and other folders would be found right after e:, and not in some folder. Still the same result. I am thinking I just need to make some simple change, and we'll be in business with it booting and operating from the new drive. Any thoughts, or just give up and load XP onto the new drive? Thanks a lot.
ddp, I tried using Ghost, but for some reason (maybe my error) it did not work. It kept referring to the old and new computer and things about a cable. The data did not show up on the new drive so I moved on to backup and restore. I think Ghost actually just put it back on the old drive. Maybe I was too impatient. GryphB, I tried the new drive alone with the jumper set as master, and also tried it with no jumper. Got same result. I may try Ghost again, but it takes so long. Thanks for the help.
Hmm... I wonder if maybe the boot path maybe corrupt. Try from a o/s repair disk and look at fixboot and fixmbr. If these are corrupt, it may fix the issue.
Unfortunately, this PC is at someone else's house so I cannot get the hard drive names right now. I don't remember how long the Ghost took, because I have tried several things and they all took a long time. There always seems to be some glitch. Anyway, part of my problem is not having the PC at my house where I can spend more than about two hours at a time. I think before I try anything else, we will remove all the extras we can from the old drive, maybe getting it down to just 10 gigs or so. When I get the drive names, I will post them. Thanks a lot.
You could have just installed the new drive as a secondary and copied most of the stuff to it and basically just left the 30 gig drive with the OS on it.
That is a thought, but the old drive is getting pretty old and we have been having to replace the boot.ini file more regularly lately, so we are hoping the new drive will help with that issue. We may end up just loading XP on to the new drive and start from scratch.
You can copy anything you want to save to some DVD's and install XP on the new drive. There is a link here with SP3 and anything else you may need. http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/windows-xp-service-pack-3.html http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/index.html
It's not the software it's the operator . Cloning is pretty straight forward as is imaging however booting after "cloning" can cause issues with dive letters if the primary drive wasn't removed first before rebooting back to windows,that ntldr that's missing is quite possibly that C partition doesn't exist because it isn't set as C,If the copy of ghost you have is late enough there should be an option when the live cd is booted you can set the drive letter to C & set partition active by rights it should boot,however you used data backup option so not sure how that's supposed to work & whether it includes boot files including partition info,so best option is clone the drive directly or create an image file of the c partition of the 30gb, however to restore that file image it must reside on the 30gb drive or an external as it can't be restored to the drive it resides on 1-best method clone you can use easeus todo for that as it will run from cd or from windows 2-create image file or if using easeus use system image shouldn't be any trouble apart from jumper settings for dell most probably best set as cs (cable select)
Today we will give this another try. During the week, we tried to add another ide drive to see if the new 320 HDD was bad, but during formatting of that other drive, the computer shut itself down saying something was about to be damaged. Maybe we are just dealing with a worn out PC. JST1946, Thanks for the links. They may come in handy. One question though, if I just decide to load XP from scratch on to the new drive (with the old drive pulled out completely), if we are unsuccessful at making the new drive work, will any of the downloads or other actions while working on the new OS installation keep the old drive from working if we put it back in by itself? I just want to be sure we have a back up plan to keep the PC running. Thank you.
It shouldn't affect the old drive while you are installing the OS in the new one and re-formatting it.Just make sure the old drive isn't connected to the system so you don't format the wrong one.Sometimes Windows doesn't always load on the 1st try on a new hard drive so have a little patience.I'm sure you will be ok.
JST1946, Thanks for the help. For some reason, the PC would not read my XP CD, so I reformatted the 320 HDD, tried Ghost gain, and after several hours, the new drive appears to have the same amount of data as the old drive. But, we put the new drive in first place on the ide ribbon (replacing the old c: drive), and it hangs on the Windows screen. Maybe I need to go back in and change the drive designation? Any other ideas? We really do not want to Ghost it again. Thanks a lot.
Sounds like you need to change the boot order in the bios so it reads from the CD first so you can install XP. http://www.wallpaperama.com/forums/how-to-install-a-fresh-copy-of-windows-xp-t6255.html
Got back to the project this evening and the new drive just shows up with only one partition, while the 30gb drive that came with the Dell PC had three partitions. Ghost says I have to copy each partition, so I made three similar sized ones on the 320gb drive and we have cloned two of the three. Tomorrow we will do the main partition which takes about four hours. I am really hoping this does it. If not, we will just install the big one as a backup. As I recall, the three partitions in the old drive are like this: 1. About 30 megs FAT 2. About 28 gigs NFTS 3. About 3 gigs FAT 32 So, I made the new drive look like that, excpet of course the third partition has about 280 gigs. I will make adjustments to the partitions later if we can just get this new drive to be the master or c: drive. Thanks for the help. JST1946, I cannot get the XP CD operate even when the bios is set to read the CD drive first. My Norton CD worked fine in the drive, so it does work. Thanks.
And to be more clear about the partitions, I am adding the desriptions. 1. About 30 megs FAT (Dell Utilities) 2. About 28 gigs NFTS (C 3. About 3 gigs FAT 32 (Dell Recovery)
There is a possibility the dell recovery partition will not work on the larger drive tho having it there is good insurance in case the older drive fails,when i cloned my recovery & c partitions the recovery failed to work i assume it must've detected the larger size or something,you might be luckier
There is a very simple solution to your problem. I am assuming that your old Dell has only a single hard disk drive and that it is capable of booting from a cd and the CD/DVD drive is fully functional. Do the following on a different PC. Ger any version of bootable "hard disk handling" iso like Partition Magic, Partition Wizard, gParted, appropriate to your hardware. For instance bootable CD image iso. Burn it to a CD and make sure it works - boots from the CD. If your PC allows booting from usb flash drive go to www.pendrivelinux.com to find your iso image. Follow their instructions for preparing the bootable usb flash drive. Next go to the PC with the hard disk that is to be upgraded. Leave the old one in and attach the new one to one of the IDE cables. You have to ensure that the jumpers on the CD rom and the hard disks are not in conflict about their settings for master and slave assignments. Set your bios to boot from CD. Your PC may also have option of boot menu upon pressing F11 or F12. Once the PC has booted to the GUI from within the GUI select your source partition, c: drive on the 30 GB, hard disk, copy paste it on to the new drive. Once this is done. You can resize the newly created partition. Repeat this procedure for the logical drives also. Finally set the copied C drive (on the new hard disk) as active and shut down the PC. Remove your old hard disk AND the CD disk from the CD/DVD drive. No need to tinker with the bios setting. You can leave the CD rom as the first boot drive. Power on the PC and everything should work flawlessly.
