Hi,

This weekend I attempted to replace my sons 60Gb hard drive with a 160Gb drive. I used Ghost to drive copy C: inc. MBR. Now I have done this before and it worked fine.

I swapped the drives and the new disk was recognised and booted. past the white blocks and up to the small XP logo on a blue background, just before you see the user accounts listed on the screen. However it didn't go beyond this.

the original drive actually had 2 partitions , a C: and a D:[BACKUP}. The latter appeared to contain mostly Compaq driver zip , neccesary if reinstalling. I actually ended up only cloning the C across, but I don't believe the D: partition is used.

I figure my problem may be because :

1) D: was needed afterall ?

2) The BIOS was unhappy with a 160Gb C drive ?

3) When both drives were in the PC, booting from the original, the new drive received the F: designation. There are a number of psosts referring to a problem where the drive retains it's temporary designation. This then has to be fixed with fdisk /mbr which, also appears only available from a win98 boot disk

I'm thinking that 3) is the most likely, but does anyone know how to get a copy of fdisk that supports the /mbr flag. Apparently an XP boot disk does not

Thanks

1) With an OEM version of XP I would assume that all partitions are necessary.

2) XP SP1 resolved all hard drive size limitations (as long as the motherboard BIOS supports it).

3) The drive you boot to will be C: Any other drives will be assigned arbitrarily. D: usually goes to DVD/CD. Secondary hard drives usually show as F: or E: etc.

Also: did you move the new drive to Primary Master? Did you try booting without the old drive installed?