Windows XP will not boot to hard drive without a boot flop..

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (More info?)

Mr. Clean wrote:
> I cloned a hard drive which had Windows XP on it (the hard drive was going
> out) and the new hard drive would not boot unless I booted first to a floippy
> with boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com. Have tried recovery console and
> everything else I can think of, but the system WILL NOT boot to the hard
> drive. I checked the boot.ini file for improper boot, but everything looks
> okay. The old hard drive had two partitions on it, but the hidden partition
> was corrupt so I deleted it. I changed the boot.ini file settings
> accordingly. Does anyone have any ideas?


Does the boot hard drive have a primary partition that is
active? Cloning may not necessarily re-set the flag that
makes the boot partition active although it will faithfully
copy the boot partition (and system partition, if different)
sector-by-sector.