XP needed on both drives to boot

[BoBaK33]

I just got a new Maxtor HD and I wanted to make it my new boot disk. So I copied all the files from the old drive onto the new one and made the old drive a slave to the new drive. The problem is the system locks at the xp welcome screen when the hd is installed on the new drive. If I install xp on both drives(new drive still the boot disk)it will boot fine. Maxtor can't help me with this, I hope someone out there can. Appreciate any help, thanks.

 

[BoBaK33]

Sorry, forgot some info, here it is:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7V333
Maxtor 60 gig
Maxtor 120 gig
Leadtek 128mb Gforce 4 Ti 4200
Audigy Soundblaster Platinum EX
XP Professional

Another weird thing is that in bios the 120 gig hd is only recognized as 32 gig but in windows the full size is recognized.

Basically, my major problem is that my comp used to boot fine until I moved XP onto the new drive and zeroed the old one. Now XP has to be on both drives regardless of which one is the boot. I didn't lose anything and my comp works fine this way but having XP on both drives just annoys me for some reason. Hopefully someone has had this experience before. Thanks.

 

[wolluf]

Hard to say what's causing your problems. How did you partition and format the new drive? What method did you use to copy old installation to new? Have you jumpered new hard drive correctly? (some have a limiting jumper for backward motherboard compatibility - eg, 32GB - XP tends to ignore bios and decide for itself about hard drive). When you booted the machine for the first time after copy, were both drives connected? (best if old drive isn't - XP would detect it AND its drive letter (presumably C and assign new drive next available (usually E: or F:, depending on CD/DVD devices). Did this happen?

 

[Jontmke]

When you say you "copied" the data do you mean an image like Ghost or Drive Image? If you just copy the files over it will not boot.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[BoBaK33]

Thanks for the response guys, but I have moved on to bigger and better problems now. I will probably post a thread about it as soon as I get my comp working again. Thanks anyway.

 

[tbirdkid]

There is alot to be said for "copying" VS "installing".

 

[Peahippo]

When you had the single drive with Windows XP, you have some partitioning scheme setup on that single hard disk. Let's for simplicity call it a single partition. That partition was the primary one, and it was marked "active".

When you setup the new drive, I'm guessing that you also made it a single, primary partition ... which tends to be made "active" also.

OR, the other drive's partitioning was secondary, which means it was not marked "active".

So, when you swapped the drives, either both were "active" and caused a problem, or your "boot" drive wasn't actually bootable (it having a secondary partition) and thus caused the need to boot from the old drive anyway.

What I'm trying to say is, you probably have a partitioning problem that is easy enough to fix once we define what it really is. By using FDISK and using its option #4, you can examine the partitions on your drives and can let us know more precisely how it looks.