Hey, I recently got a new hard drive, a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA drive to replace my old 120 GB PATA drive (not sure about the model because its a used computer). I had no issues installing the new drive and getting it recognized by Vista. I then used to Aconis' True Image 11 Clone Disk to get everything onto the new drive. No issues there. Went into the BIOS and make the SATA drive the boot drive. No problems then.

Anyway, I decided to disconnect the old drive to test and see if the new one is set. Everything boots well until Vista takes an unusually long time to load the desktop, and then finishes with a light blue blackground with no icons or taskbar. I'm not sure, but I've heard that even after setting up a drive as the boot drive, it needs to still be made the primary one, which I figure might be related to the problem. I've checked on how to do that, and the drive jumper settings are mentioned. However I've heard the SATA HD doesn't use jumper settings like a PATA, so I would imagine the issue might be something I need to change elsewhere.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Did you powerup and boot fromPATA drive with new drive connected, but blank. This would let VISTA detect and load drivers for new SATA drive. Thern image and disconnect PATA before rebooting with only SATA drive.

Mike.

I cleared the new drive of all the installed data to start over again. Formated again, and saw that Vista says it has the to-date drivers installed already. So that doesn't appear to be the issue at all. Since the data is a clone of the old drive, I don't see why there should be a problem in the later stages of booting up because then I'd expect this to be a problem all the time.

Okay, I've re-cloned the old PATA drive, then rebooted the computer and made the page file on the new drive and when I rebooted for that to happen went into the BIOS to make the SATA drive the boot drive. No problems, so I shut down, and disconnected the PATA drive.

Like I said earlier, it boots up normally in the beginning when then it takes 2-3 loading the desktop, which just finished as a light blue. This time I accessed Windows Task Manager and managed to manually get AIM and Firefox online.

In the feature to browse for programs to start up, the search feature appears to be nonfunctional. Even files and programs that clearly on-screen in the browser are not found.

Finally, I noticed that in the processes tab for WTM, the number of running processes is unusually low. There is less than 10 running.

Hope this more clear explanation helps someone help me. Thanks.

Download and run Seatools on the Seagate drive, it may be faulty. DFT from IBM/Hitachi is pretty good for testing direct.

Mike.

I can't see to be able to run either of the two problems. SeaTools installs properly, but when I attempt to run it, I can this message:
"This device may not support pass through!"

and I'm not sure if its relevent to the problem, but before this error message pops up, and before I click okay to quit the program, I get what I guess is the normal start-up box:
"Scanning for supported drives. Please wait..."

So it seems like SeaTools can't help me with this problem. And DFT is no easier. I either need to burn a CD or put it on an old 1.44 MB floppy disc, and I currently do not have a CD-R drive hooked up. I attempted to mount it on a virtual drive but the program appears to be incompatible with the 64-bit version of Vista.

Get in touch with Seagate Tech Support. If Seatools cannot run on that drive it would appear to be faulty!

Mike.

So, I've tested the hard drive using both DFT and SeaTools (now that I've finally managed to get a hold of a CD-burner) and it seems like the drive is fine. It is possible this issue is a software one and not a hardware one?

I've never used Acronis, have you read the manual? I've always used Ghost, and had no problems. The safest is to power down after imaging, remove the sourse drive and set BIOS to boot from new drive and it should start as usual. You then power down and reconnect old drive, but make sure that it is NOT the first boot device and you can then use the old drive for data storage and delete any old system files.

Mike.