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Hard Drive Cloning Problem

1012 Views 10 Replies 4 Participants Last post by WiseMan, Jan 16, 2005

WiseMan

Discussion Starter · Jan 15, 2005

I have a problem.

I used the Western Digital Drive 2 Drive clone tool through windows. It copied all but 3 files, which the Western Digital prog said were not needed in order for the operating system to run.

So I turn off pc, remove failing hard drive, change jumpers, and set new one to main. Start up my pc, windows xp loads, and the logon screen comes up. I enter my username/password, and then it says Loading Users Settings...then it just stays on that and keeps loading...doing nothing.

So, obviously something is missing. How can I fix this? Should I just wipe the new drive and try again? Any help is appreciated, I need it for tomorrow.

(im back on my old, quickly dieing drive)

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JohnWill

· #8 · Jan 15, 2005

A trick I've heard of using for such situations that may work is boot from an MS-DOS floppy and type:

FDISK /MBR

XP/2K records a signature in the boot record of a drive and maps it to a drive letter. If you clone to a disk that has already been formatted and is a drive letter other than C:, it will screw up the login process, right after the login screen. Worth a shot, and it's easy to do.

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JohnWill

· #10 · Jan 16, 2005

This is the problem. There is another way if the machine is on a network, you can actually attach to the registry from a remote machine and edit the entries. This normally happens when this disk has been in a machine and has had a drive letter assigned. You then clone to the disk and try to change it to be the boot drive.

Open Regedit, File, Connect Remote Registry, browse to the machine and connect.

Browse to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SYSTEM, Current Control Set, Mounted Devices

There are a bunch of keys labeled DosDevices\x: where x is a drive letter. Pick the C: drive and change the C to X. Pick the drive letter of the previous location that the disk was located when it was cloned, change it to C

Disconnect from the remote registry.

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