Ghosted 160G XP to 500G...stops before welcome screen

[pcoghlan]

My ASUS-based system has been running XP on the following:

- a SATA-I 160G drive on controller 0
- partitions for C, D and G (E/F are CD-ROM and DVD-ROM)

I added a 500G SATA-II (Seagate) drive on controller 1 and cloned the 3 partitions with Ghost 9, including the MBR on the first partition. I also marked the first partition as active.

When I swap cables and reboot, I get the black XP loader screen, followed by a blue screen with a small WinXP logo, instead of the usual Welcome screen with all the user names.

I've seen variants of this problem in various threads, often in cases where people are trying to upgrade to SATA from IDE. I've done upgrades before - usually IDE-to-IDE - and when I've had a problem it's been due to not copying the MBR or marking the 1st partition as active.

I'm guessing that Windows knows the new drive started life on another controller (1) and therefore doesn't want to load on controller 0 after the cable swap. I suspect that if I leave it connected to controller 1, Windows will still be looking for the first disk on controller 0 and also refuse to boot.

What can I do short of re-installing on the new drive?

 

[pcoghlan]

Solved it. Looks like the Windows signature on each partition (DiskID) problem. Windows doesn't want to run on any partition not identified in the registry as the original install partition (to prevent piracy, I guess).

I used Acronis True Image 2009. Replicated all 3 partitions perfectly on the new drive. I swapped cables, and *presto*, I was running on the new drive.

I already removed my installed copy of Ghost 9.

 

[mike99]

used Acronis True Image 2009. Replicated all 3 partitions perfectly on the new drive. I swapped cables, and *presto*, I was running on the new drive.

:lol:
That's what you should have done with Ghost! All you had to do was clone the driv, shut down and disconnect the original, substitute the new drive and boot with it on its own. Then you can shut down, fit the old drive and use it for storage.

Mike.

 

[pcoghlan]

I've used Ghost with IDE (PATA) drives in the past with success. One only needed to be sure to check the "copy MBR" box and make the drive active, then swap the cables.

The problem is that, apparently, the signature that Windows writes into each partition looks the same for master/slave drives on the same controller, but SATA drives have their own controller and apparently once Windows writes the DiskID on them, the new drive is always detected by Windows as being different, and Windows never gets to the Welcome screen.

There are some workarounds which apparently involve initializing the 4-byte signature to zeroes on the new system partition. Perhaps if I had made all the space unallocated on the new drive and backed up the old drive to an external drive and restored it to the new drive it might have worked, but True Image replicates the entire physical drive and all its partitions in one operation.

So long Ghost.