I have a friend who wants to install a larger HDD into a computer. The original HDD is naturally designated as C:, and he then added the larger HDD (designated ad E: through Disk Management) with the intention of transferring all of the info from the original to the new one. He used some sort of mirroring program to copy the disk contents.

While the computer readily recognizes the E: disk, there is apparently no way to boot from it. I did some research and found that there are supposedly something like 5 files that relate to the bootup from C: which are not transferred over through a mirror program.

The goal is to make the computer bootable from the larger drive, and then remove the smaller one, but we're not sure how to accomplish this.

In Disk Management, C: is shown as the System Disk, which I assume indicates it's where it boots from. I haven't been able to find anything which explains how to designate E: as the System Disk, or how to add the necessary boot files to E:.

Regarding having all of the necessary boot files:

I'm assuming the OS is windows - which flavor of windows?

In the old, old days I think the command was "sys". After copying over the windows directories and such, one would type "sys E:" and a few more essential files would be set up. This probably doesn't help you, I'm just reminiscing.

Knowing which flavor of windows you are using might help us.



Also back in the old days, and in the case of IDE disks, if I remember correctly windows (or more accurately the bios) would recognize which disk to boot from based on how it was positioned on the cable. You know, sometimes offering up worthless information (like my post) motivates other people to correct you and offer worthwhile information.

Hey, MT, good to see you.

This is using Windows XP.

Depending on the type of HDD you have you will have to do 1 of 2 things. If it is an older drive it will have jumper pins and you will need to change the master/slave settings or you can go into the computers bios and change the drive to boot from.

We already took care of the jumper situation because the new HDD had to be "scaled down" for use in this particular computer.

The manufacturer told us that both HDDs would have to be set up as "masters" in order to do this, but BIOS doesn't recognize the new HDD as "Secondary Master." They're showing a DVDR as "Secondary Master."

Will the pc boot up with new hard drive if you disconnect the old one?

No, we tried that, but apparently there are five specific bootup files that remain on C: but which weren't transferred to E: during the mirroring process.

I did some research on this, and found three of them on C: -- boot.ini, ntldr, and Ntdetect.com.

The other two which were mentioned -- cmldr and bootsect.dos -- I can't find at all.

You may want to use a program like Norton Ghost or
another disk cloning utility. These can make a complete
bootable copy of a drive for backup purposes.

There are several options.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_cloning_software

Did that, using DrvClonerXP -- that actually went very smoothly. Problem is it won't boot from the copied disk.

Hey Lex! Good to see you, too!

At some point the MBR of the new disk has to be set up... do you know if thats been done?

EDIT: I mean, setup for booting...obviously its been setup for the partitioning.

I'd just try again with a different cloner utility or check if
there have been reports of problems or settings with DrvClonerXP.
I am not familiar with this one.

Well, this is the first I've heard of it, so I'm guessing no!

Would you recommend Norton Ghost? I've seen it mentioned a lot but don't know anything about this stuff.

Well, it might have been done automatically - or you might have done it while telling some software to 'make it bootable' (and the software didn't tell you it was changing the MBR).

Agree. Sounds like something is wrong with image. If it is a clean image it should boot. Another option would be to start from scratch with the new drive and just load XP. Slave the old drive and copy stuff over.

Before you re-image the drive, can you tell us exactly what it does when you try to boot up with the new drive alone?

Does it say something like 'system not found' or does the screen stay blank or does it start to boot up and fail or something else entirely?

It looks like it's staring to boot, the usual opening stuff scrolls down the screen, and then it says:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Thank you, Lex. Thats consistent with what you and everyone else is saying - I just wanted to be certain.

Sounds to me like a bios setting. If you go into the bios there is a place where you can chose the drive to boot from. If it is a Western Digital drive you might try removing the jumper completely.

Clone the drive again using a better program using a boot cd. Here's the best cloning program around

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/