[Armand1880]

Hi all - I'm not sure if this is the correct forum to post to, forgive me if it's not.
I just upgraded my PC (I'll list the specs below) - and I'm having an issue. I upgraded the motherboard, video card, power supply, ram and (trying to) hard drive. I'm making the jump from PATA to SATA, and from AGP to PCI-E. Big day for me and my gaming habits.
I'm upgrading my OS hard drive from a WD 80GB PATA to a WD 640gig SATA - and I'm having issues. I've used Norton Ghost to clone the old hard drive (with my main utilities and Windows on it - I had the OS partition set to 15GB, so that is what I cloned over) to a new partition on the 640GB (80GB partition). So - 15GB OS partition to a new 80GB partition to run my OS. Problems are ensuing. After cloning and unplugging the old drive, the new one won't boot Windows - the BIOS won't recognize the new drive as master - only a slave, and it won't load.
I even used Partition magic to try to change my new partition to C...no avail, it still loaded from the G drive (which was my old hard drive - and the computer even changed the settings back after another reboot).
I've tried different scenarios:
1.) Unplugging both my PATA hard drives (I have another slave WD 320GB)- the bios does not recognize the new drive as being a master - it says its a slave, and won't load anything.
2.) Leaving my old C drive as master - and it loads from that, and changes my drive letter settings back after changing the drive letters through partition magic (old drive C, new OS partition G). If I don't do anything to the drive letters - it loads fine from the old Hard drive.
3.) Changing the jumper on my old drive to slave - but Windows loads to the screen where my login choices should be - and sits there with the Windows XP logo - not moving.

I'm beginning to think that I should just do a clean install of Windows XP on the new hard drive, save everything I need on my 320gig slave, and just take out the old OS hard drive completely. But when I do that, the computer reads my 320 gig slave as the C drive instead of the new 640 gig drive - it recognizes them both as slaves - and won't load anything.
I don't know if any of this makes sense, but if someone could help me out - I'm more than willing to give more information or clarify anything. Any advice?

GIGABYTE GA-MA770T-UD3P Mobo
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
XFX Radeon HD 4870 1GB
WD Caviar Blue 640GB SATA(New hard drive that I want to use and partition - 80 GB or so for the OS and utilities, the rest for games and whatnot)
WD Caviar 80GB PATA (Current master with my OS on it - 15GB is partitioned with OS, the rest is storage)
Seagate Barracuda 320GB PATA (current slave that I would like to be able to have set up and eventually move to the larger partition of the new drive)

[mbonwick]

With all the changes you've made, you'd be very lucky to get a cloned XP running.
The drivers are just not there for the new hardware.

I'd really suggest you re-install and start again...and you can clear the crap!

[Carbon]

Don't bother partitioning drives anymore. Unless you want to short-stroke it for the speed, partitioning drives just ends up being a pain in the ass. I'm also seconding mbonwick's suggestion - this is not a scenario where imaging a drive is a good idea. You will eventually just end up reinstalling Windows - whether because of it freaking out about activation, or the now-ridiculous set of drivers being relied on by the OS and now incompatible with your current hardware.

I don't understand what's happening in your clean install scenario. Windows does not usually recognize hard drives as "master" and "slave" during setup, the BIOS uses those terms and configures accordingly. Regardless, SATA shouldn't care. Try putting the drive in AHCI mode & load a SATA driver during startup - if the drive is not in legacy IDE mode, XP will not recognize it.

[Armand1880]

I got it all working last night. The new hard drive had my old one imaged on the first partition - but that partition was called G, so I couldn't do anything - that is why it wouldn't boot - everything was looking fro C:. So I repaired my Windows installation with my XP cd, and it booted. Only bad thing is that it wouldn't run most of my programs because they are set up to look for C:. I went into regedit.exe and changed the drive letter from G to C, and restarted. But....Windows did the same thing, wouldn't boot because it was looking for G:\Windows. Solution: repair Windows installation again. That fixed it. I then copied all of my games, pics, music from my old D: slave drive to the new bigger partition, and then changed that partition to D and rebooted.
Everything runs great just like it did originally.
I know that people frown on partitioning these days - eventually I'll get a separate hard drive and call it good.