Member Avatar for Mike G

Have installed a new second HD but am unable to make it the master.

Have copied old drive (C) to the new drive (I named G).

Recommended jumper settings don't seem to work. Have tried cable select option as well.

Old drive is Location (0) New drive in Location (1)

Should I change location? And if so How?

Do I need to make some changes when booting (F2) to the Primary or Secondary Devices?

Should I rename the drives? If so How?

That's all I can think of.

OS is XP Home Edition

Thanks in advance

Mike G

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Good troubleshooting so far from and the practical hardware hint from . For clarity and a reliable final setup: older parallel-ATA systems use the drive jumpers plus the cable position to decide which disk the BIOS treats as the primary; SATA uses one drive per port and boot priority is set in the BIOS. If a cloned disk does not boot, the usual causes are a missing or damaged master boot record, the system partition not marked active, or the BIOS still pointing to the old device. Boot from recovery/install media and repair the boot area (for older Windows the Recovery Console commands include fixmbr and fixboot; newer Windows have Startup Repair/bootrec).

If the goal is an ongoing mirrored/backup setup, true real-time mirroring normally requires a hardware RAID controller or OS support for mirrored volumes (software RAID). When that is not available, periodic full or incremental disk images or file-sync tools give a safer, simpler backup strategy than trying to keep two cloned disks live at the same time. Imaging tools that support incremental updates avoid repeated full clones.

Quick practical checklist: power down before moving cables; test the cloned drive as the only drive to confirm it boots; if the BIOS does not see a drive check power/data cables and try a different port; once both drives are present, use Disk Management (or your OS disk utility) to verify which volume is active and to assign non-conflicting drive letters or offline the backup disk so the system stays stable.

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Member Avatar for fry

i guees you are talking about IDE drives, to change locations of drives, just change the connectors, i mean plug the new drive to the old one's connector, of course set drives jumpers "cable select". does the new drive have windows installed? How did you copied the old drive on new one?

Member Avatar for Mike G

I copied my old drive info to the new one with Norton Ghost. I finally got the second drive up and configured to be the master after installing/formatting using XP.

Now I'm trying to re-copy the old drive to the new one.

My goal is to replace the old drive before it fails, but use it as a secondary/backup/mirror(?) in the mean time.

I thought Ghost would accomplish this.

Do I need RAID software or other hardware?

Thanks.

Mike

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