Disk boot failure

garcia

Hi all,
I've recently upgraded my hard disk to a bigger size. Copied over my partitions fine. Replaced my old hd with the new one. Only I can't boot into the new hd. I get the message "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter".

Any ideas whats going on??

Many thanks.

albertross_2

what did you use to copy the data?

If ide, have you made sure it's set to master or cable select?

garcia

Its ide, set to cable select.

I used a freeware prog. to copy over the data - its called DriveImage XML. Received good reviews, and seemed to work well.

albertross_2

you could try fdisk, to make sure the partition is set to active, and if that doesn't work fixmbr or fixboot

garcia

You were right it was a question of setting the active partition.

Windows boots. But instead of my usual log-in screen I get a low-graphics version, which asks for my password then says "logging out" and hangs.

I strongly suspect that its to do with drive letter assignment. I have my old hdd as c: and d: and my new hdd as e: and f:, e: being the partition which I've just made active.

Now I can boot from e: but only if I have the old hdd hooked up.

Any way I can change drive letter assignments??

Chippy_Minton

garcia wrote:

Its ide, set to cable select.

Try setting the new drive to Master and the old one to Slave (or leave out altogether initially). With Cable Select and both old and new drives on the same IDE cable the BIOS may be getting confused over which drive to boot from.

albertross_2

You could try putting in the old disk as master, new disk as slave, go into driveimagexml, tools, new disk id.

If it still doesn't work, are either of the drives maxtors..

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/menuitem.3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068/?channelpath=%2Fen_us%2FSupport%2FSoftware+Downloads%2FTop+Downloads&downloadID=19

garcia

@Chippy: both drives are on different cables (only 1 drive per cable).

@albertross: I think you are right. The initial problem I had was I hadn't set the partition to be active. Once I did that it booted fine, but just got the drive assignments wrong and would hang if I didn't connect up the old drive too. I think the new disk id should do the trick (I'm in the middle of copying it again, but as soon as its done I'll try it).

Thanks both for the help.

P.S. Neither of the drives are maxtors. Old one is seagate barracuda. New one is Samsung Spinpoint.

garcia

Just an update for albertross - it worked!

Chkdsk needed to fix a few errors on the new disk, but once done everything worked perfectly.

I highly recommend DriveImage XML for anyone who wants to:

-Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
-Browse these images, view and extract files
-Restore these images to the same or a different drive
-Copy directly from drive to drive
-Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler

Thanks to all who helped,
Garcia.

garcia

I tried it several ways, including the "raw image" option - which is actually a weird option because it resizes the target partition so that its the same size as your original partition (so not a very useful option as you lose disk space).

I needed to do the disk id thing. I suspect that windows "remembered" that my new disk was drive E: and F: and so got confused when I tried to boot from it. Giving it a new id eliminates this possibility, with no down side. Of course it might work for some without having to do this.

I imagine that the chkdsk errors were because I was using the computer whilst backing up, rather than anything serious - e.g. it recovered some temp files that I had deleted.

P.S. I see that you can run the prog. from winpe / bartpe.
http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm
If you had one of those disks handy you could then just back up and not worry about things like disk id until you actually needed to restore a copy.