Changing Hard Drives

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duncan

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Hello - please help - it's doin' my head in!!!

Have a Dell Dimension with 20Gb Hard Drive - have bought a 120Gb to replace because I want to put Linux on aswell as Xp that I already have. Used Partition Magic to Copy XP partition from 20GB drive to free space on 120Gb drive - copies fine, but sais something about 'this partition might not be bootable' I have tried copying it in it's external usb-IDE case and also plugged inside the case as a primary slave. Both copy partition, but have same answer about not being bootable. Looked in BIOS - sais maximum size next to new disk 65535 meg or something similar, so I reduced the NTFS partition down to 60000MB, as I was originally going to have 80/40 with the 40GB for Linux. Still the same - doesnt boot from primary XP partition. If you can help you are a genius.!

PS there's a big drink in it for you if I ever met you
 
P.S There's a discrepancy of about 5 MB between the original and copid partitions - does this mean anything - I was expecting them to be identical.
 
dont use partition magic to copy. Only use it for partitioning your hard drives. Use Norton Ghost to copy partitions or entire hard drives.
 
You cant boot from the new drive because it doesnt have your master boot record on it.
 
how do i put the MBR on the new drive - or is that not the way it works??

Can you do this with partition magic or as Sport1031 sais above, with Norton Ghost?
 
This can happen even when using Norton Ghost.

I had 2 IBM's I was rebuilding for my company (I'm the tech support guy). The machines were very similar. (same model of Netvista but with different sized hard drives and slightly different motherboards)

I made an image of Win2k and gosted it onto the second machine. I booted it and got a "Inaccessable boot device" error.

I booted into the recovery console off the cd and used ALL the recovery tools, including the one that rebuild the MBR. But it didn't help.

"Inaccessable boot device"

I booted into the DOS tools from Partition Magic and corrected a partition table error.

"Inaccessable boot device"

Booted back into recovery console and re ran all the correction tools.

"Inaccessable boot device"

At this point I decided I was spending more time on it that it would take to rebuild it from scratch. So that's what I did.

Technet has some stuff on how to correct this. You'll have to do the search yourself.

Im my case I think it was that the IDE driver was looking for something that didn't exist on the new MB, or perhaps it had a configuration setting that didn't work with the new MB. All of which piss me off because they were supposed to be identical machines... but that's another story...

What I suggest is to boot back into your original drive, uninstall the IDE controller from device manager, then shutdown (NOT REBOOT). Then ghost that image to your new drive, install, and boot up.

This might solve your problem. At least it's what I'd try next....
 
Format the 120 and install it as a second HD. Transfer files from the 20 to 120 to free up its space, then partion part of it off and install Linux.

You'll have a dual boot 20 gig HD, and a 120 gig storage drive.
 
what you just CTRL-A and then dragged onto the new drive (pre-formatted obviously) - might be the easiest solution yet... can you confirm
 
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