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fabio · Member Joined: 09 Sep 2006 Posts: 2

Hello,

I have been having problem starting Windows XP Home Edition.

Basically in a nutshell, I am upgrading my hard drive, so I used Norton Ghost to Copy Disk (clone) the old hard drive and store the data directly onto the new one.

Then I attempted to start Windows using the new hard disk, but then it hangs on Windows XP's splash screen (right before asking me to logon).

I already tried Safe Mode but no luck. There is no system error (I used ScanDisk and Norton Utilities to check already) and partitions seems fine. Master Boot Record restored but still no luck.

Can someone please help? I don't want to reinstall the whole XP.

Thanks in advance. cry baby

BeeGuy · Member Joined: 18 Feb 2007 Posts: 2

I am experiencing exactly the same symptoms after using Norton Ghost 9.0 to Copy an 8GB drive to a 120GB drive. The systme recognizes the new hard drive and boots Windows XP up until the Welcome screen and then will not display the logon screen.

I did find something on the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816873
that describes similar symptoms when a network share mapped to a drive letter is not available. Although that is not this specific problem, an Alt-Tab does seem to indicate that there is a second logon window hidden.

Did you ever find a resolution?

Stevo · GURU Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 308 Location: Tennessee

Does Norton Ghost copy all of the partitions on the hard drive to the new one? Probably not, which would cause the system to crash because there would not be a system partition. If you are putting the coppied hard drive into a new computer, you will run into loads of other problems.

Your best bet is to install Windows XP on the second hard drive and then manually copy the non-system files or use the Files and Settings Transfer wizard.

Stevo
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BeeGuy · Member Joined: 18 Feb 2007 Posts: 2

After doing quite a bit of searching on the web I found that this is a common problem, with many and varied attempted fixes.

I believe the root of my problem came from a combination of XP's drive letter assignment behavior and Ghost's failure to deal with it. If the original XP system ever sees the partition of the new drive (and assigns a drive letter to it) before Ghost clones the old system to the new drive, then the new drive will have a registry entry with its own Partition ID listing it as being something other than Drive C. When you install the new drive in the PC and reboot, the new drive is discovered by the BIOS and starts booting XP as Drive C. Once XP is fully loaded, it thinks the current drive should be some other drive letter, and you lose the boot drive, causing the hang at the Windows Logon screen.

Personally I solved the problem by using the widely recommended Acronis TrueImage. TrueImage deals first with the drive letter assignment and then gets out of Windows proper to perform the disk copy. Then when the system reboots into XP, even if you leave the new drive connected as a hard drive it is OK. Even though the old system will now see the cloned partition and likely assign it a drive letter other than C, the image on the new drive has already been copied without that assignment. When you swap the drives the new drive will boot properly into Windows.

If you really want to use Ghost's Disk Copy function, be sure that the old system does not have a drive letter assigned to the new drive's partition. You may need to go into Control Panel.. Computer Management.. Disk Management to make sure that there is no drive letter assigned to the new drive and even delete the new drive's partition if one exists.

No guarantees on the specifics here, but hopefully that will be helpful to someone. In my experience, Acronis got it right, Symantec didn't.