Hi
Simple problem Drive C is running out of space. Easy solution buy a new hard drive and copy everything to the new drive. Simple? a nightmare!
I have bought a larger HDD a Seagate 250GB and want to use that as a replacement for my existing 60GB WD HDD. I have a Dell 8200 1.8 ghz P4 of 2001 vintage running XP Pro SP3. It has an additional 80GB HDD (which is used mainly for daily backups of Drive C and has two external USB Lacie drives which are used for storing photos and reference material. My PC is protected by Windows firewall & Defender & AVG 8 Auto Update is in operation.
I used Ghost 9.0 and connected the new drive using a USB 2 to Ide cable kit. I copied drive C but forgot to copy the Dell utility to the new drive. But did copy it after copying the main partition. (I read somewhere to leave the new drive as hidden so as to not alter the drive letters and thought that it would be better to keep the Lacies on). I am fairly sure that I selected Copy MBR but can't be sure now. I next used Norton partition Magic 8 to move the Dell utility to the first location on the drive. The rest of the new drive's space was unallocated.
When I swopped the C drive for the new drive the system won't boot. I tried all sorts of permutations and then had difficulty even accessing the drive. I used Knoppix and was able to accesss the drive after being told that the NFTS is unclean! I used the ntfsfix command.
Afterwards I was able to see the new drive connected as before using the USB kit. It still wouldn't boot so I then used NP Magic again and made the drive un-hidden. It was then automatically assigned the drive letter H which is correct. I then swopped the new for the old and tried to reboot without success. There are two options to boot Winxp and Winxp #1. I presume that the second option the one marked #1 would entail connecting the new HDD to the USB kit and have not tried that. i don't know whether the system can identify a different instance of WinXP and won't boot from the new HDD because of that when the new drive is in the place of the old Drive C.
I checked in Setup that the HDDs are being correctly identified and they are. I next ran the Ghost disk in diagnostic mode and used Norton Disk Doctor to check the drives -they passed ok but the new 250GB .C Drive was still identified as being only 60GB but then the rest of the space is unallocated so that might not be an error. Next I ran the XP Installation disk and selected Repair. It went through the repair but the PC still wouldn't boot. I then ran the XP disk again in Console mode and did a CHKDSK then used FIXMBR, the system reported that the MBR was a non-standard or invalid MBR so I went ahead and the MBR was replaced. I next tried to boot up and the PC still wouldn't get past two beeps and "F1 to retry or F2 to enter Setup"
I have now replaced the original HDD and the PC boots up ok. Fortunately I have a laptop so I can research the web and still receive email etc.
I don't know what to do next? Should I Format/S the new drive when its connected to the PC with the USB kit and try to copy the C Drive again with Ghost? I did try copying without formating but ghost wouldn't do the copy -as there was not enough space - it wouldn't overwrite the old copy. Or could I simply delete the partitions using Partition Magic and then use Ghost to copy Drive C again. Or is there some other factor that is preventing the boot up?
