Problem booting with ghosted drive.

I have a computer that has a suspected intermittent fault in the hdd. We were getting all sorts of strange Xp errors and then everything would be fine again for a few more days. Then the computer wouldn't boot and gave an error message about Hardware failure. An audible clicking noise was heard from inside but it stopped when hdd activity stopped. Thie was also intermittent and the drive started working again shortly afterwards. This drive was a 20gb seagate.

I hooked up a second drive (a 40gb Seagate) and after booting up I couldnt see the drive in XP. I checked the BIOS and the drive was there but just could not see it in XP. I made sure the jumpers were set right and tried cable select but still nothing in XP.

I then rebooted using the Norton ghost boot disc and copied the 20gb drive across to the new 40gb drive (Which ghost was able to see I might add.)
I then removed the original C drive and set the new drive to master but on reboot got an error message about Non system disk. For some reason the new cloned drive was not bootable, any ideas???

I then did a repair install of Xp to get it to boot which worked but now it has a drive lettter of F (2 cd-roms are D and E) When I go into the BIOS it is set as slave with no master being shown. I tried different jumper settings (Master, Cable select) but its still shows up as a slave drive in the BIOS with NONE in the Master drive section. It still shows as F drive instead of C drive in XP.

Any ideas????

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Originally Posted by riddellcomp

I have a computer that has a suspected intermittent fault in the hdd. We were getting all sorts of strange Xp errors and then everything would be fine again for a few more days. Then the computer wouldn't boot and gave an error message about Hardware failure. An audible clicking noise was heard from inside but it stopped when hdd activity stopped. Thie was also intermittent and the drive started working again shortly afterwards. This drive was a 20gb seagate.

I hooked up a second drive (a 40gb Seagate) and after booting up I couldnt see the drive in XP. I checked the BIOS and the drive was there but just could not see it in XP. I made sure the jumpers were set right and tried cable select but still nothing in XP.

I then rebooted using the Norton ghost boot disc and copied the 20gb drive across to the new 40gb drive (Which ghost was able to see I might add.)
I then removed the original C drive and set the new drive to master but on reboot got an error message about Non system disk. For some reason the new cloned drive was not bootable, any ideas???

I then did a repair install of Xp to get it to boot which worked but now it has a drive lettter of F (2 cd-roms are D and E) When I go into the BIOS it is set as slave with no master being shown. I tried different jumper settings (Master, Cable select) but its still shows up as a slave drive in the BIOS with NONE in the Master drive section. It still shows as F drive instead of C drive in XP.

Any ideas????

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well for the first problem about it not being bootable after ghosting. I have had this problem before also it usually happened to me when I was doing partition copies. it had to do with not having any partitions being active on the destination drive. pretty simple to fix really. boot with partition magic if you have it and just set the NTFS partition as active. you can do it with Fdisk as well.

I'm a little lost on the second part of the problem with drive letters and such. I've had this occur when running windows setup with more than one drive in the pc and one drive has partitions already setup and one drive doesn't have any partitions set up on it. . . . but that doesn't sound like your problem

since you still have the 20gb drive intact, I would start fresh - redo the whole process. If you ghost make sure you are ghosting disk to disk. and if it's still not bootable after ghost, use a partition manager like partition magic or even fdisk to set the NTFS partition as active and it should work fine.

Thanks Kato,

I suspected it was soemthing along those lines too.
I am re doing it all now. When finished I will use fdisk to set active partition and see how it goes.

When you say boot with partition magic, I do have PM but did not know you could create a boot disc with it?

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Originally Posted by riddellcomp

Thanks Kato,

I suspected it was soemthing along those lines too.
I am re doing it all now. When finished I will use fdisk to set active partition and see how it goes.

When you say boot with partition magic, I do have PM but did not know you could create a boot disc with it?

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you can create rescue disks. two floppies - disk one starts loading dos - disk 2 will launch the program.

Okay I cloned the drives, removed the old drive and rebooted with a boot floppy. I went into fdisk, tried to set the partition as active but got an error message..."THE ONLY STARTABLE PARTITON ON DRIVE 1 IS ALREADY SET AS ACTIVE."

So I rebooted without the floppy but I still get a non system disk error ad cannot boot to Windows.

Any suggestions?? Im off to bed but will give what you suggest a try in the morning.

Thanks..

Try resetting the boot record - fdisk /mbr

good tip shamus


also. . . I'd maybe make sure that the new drive is jumpered exactly as the old drive was. seen motherboards that were weird about this before too. (i.e. hard drive set as master on primary and cdrom as slave on secondary - and the cdrom would not be detected by the bios - not until it was either moved the the primary channel as slave or set as secondary master https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gif) so if the orignal drive was set as CS and on the first ribbon position, then set the new drive up the same way - even though logic says it shouldn't matter - I've been around computers long enough to know logic doesn't always factor into the equation - as strange as that sounds.

The hdd was on the primary ide channel whilst the secondary has a cd-rom and a cd burner.

However I did notice that the hdd was not set as master. I think it may have been set to CS instead, (I cant remember now as I have since changed it.) I did try the new drive with various jumper settings but no luck.

When I have only the new drive connected up the BIos shows it as a slave with the master set as none.(Even though I only have the one drive connected.)
Why wouldthe BIOS be doing this?

Im at work now but will try the fdisk /mbr and the other suggestions when I get home.