Hard Drive Cloning Problem

[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)

 

[HoLoCroN]

More than likely, the problem is caused by a driver incompatibility issue. By imaging your old pc's hard drive onto the new hard drive, Windows XP is trying to load the drivers from the old pc on your new one... which just wont work.

There is a utility called sysprep that is designed to reset the windows driver database and helps avoid some of these hardware incompatibility issues.

How to Use Sysprep: An Introduction

I recommend creating an image to backup your old PC before running sysprep, saving it somewhere then try using the sysprep tool to help in your migration.

Also keep in mind, you will need your Windows XP Key after sysprep is ran.

 

[Armand1880]

I was under the impression that all of those drivers would have transferred over with Ghost's cloning tool. If I were just to boot up with my XP disc and "repair" my installation, would that work as well?

 

[HoLoCroN]

A repair install would reset the driver database. Make sure to have a good backup just in case.

 

[Armand1880]

My other issue is that if I unplug my old C Drive from the computer, the bios won't read my new SATA drive as the master, even if my other storage drive set as slave with the jumper. It reads it as slave as well with no master set. It comes to a Windows 98 error, sends me to the dos prompt with C:\> as the command line. if i hit DIR to see what is on the drive, it shows that my old storage drive (which was D) is being shown as C. I know that is why it's showing the Win 98 error, because it's not showing windows on that drive - It's not reading my SATA drive as the master - which has the cloned OS hard drive on it at this point. How can I get the mobo to look at my new SATA drive as master? In the bios it'll show two slaves.

Edit: thanks for your help so far, by the way.

 

[HoLoCroN]

With SATA hard drives there is no master/slave relationship as you know it in IDE drives. SATA has multiple channels (SATA-0,1,2, etc.) which means one device per channel. The jumpers on SATA drives usually dictate storage limitations and transmit speeds.

What you can do is in the BIOS, choose which hard drive you want to be the primary boot drive. Try setting your SATA Caviar Blue as primary.

 

[Armand1880]

One more question: if the drive has not yet been assigned the letter C: - will it still boot from the drive? If there are no other drives plugged in except my old D: storage drive, should that still be alright?
I'll be trying this stuff when I get home tonight from work.

 

[Armand1880]

Update:
I got everything working. Here is the rundown.
1.)I unplugged my old master drive now that it was imaged on the new G: partition of my new HDD. The reason it was not starting up is because it was reading Windows XP on the C drive, and that was not the case anymore. I did have to repair the installation of Windows XP in order to get into the system. Once that was done, I got it.
2.) Problem was that most of my programs were looking for C:, so only Windows itself would run, and none of my programs. Solution: change the drive letter in regedit.exe. Once I did that, I restarted, and the computer booted up...to the same problem as before. It would sit on the XP loading screen. Why? Because now Windows was looking for G:!! Solution - repair Windows installation AGAIN. That sucked, but once I did it it booted up great.
3.) I transferred everything from my old slave D drive over to the new big partition of the new HDD, which was the H: drive. But none of the programs on that would work because they were set to D:, so I changed the drive letter to D:, shut down the computer, unplugged my old slave - and it booted up beautifully.

In the end, I only had to run the Windows system updates, and reinstall Windows Media Player and AVG. Once those system updates were installed, all my preexisting drivers kicked in and everything worked beautifully. In the long run, I could have just wiped it clean and did a fresh install of everything, but I'm going to have to do that soon when I get Windows 7 anyway...but that will probably be good to get a clean slate when that happens.
Thanks for the help.