[Pro] My cloned drive won't boot properly

[Dickster]

I have two hard drives on my system. The slave drive contains my XP system partition as well as two others. The drive has been acting up lately so I bought a replacement. I imaged the entire slave drive using Ghost, and then loaded the image onto the replacement drive. Ghost completed the image with no errors.

Now when I install the replacement drive in place of the original slave, Windows will make it all the way past the scrolling blue box screen, and then onto the light blue Welcome screen. At this point the screen goes blank and the system hangs. I checked the jumper setting and it is correct. Safe mode will not start properly either.

Next I put my original drive back and connected the replacement drive as a second slave drive. Windows can access the replacement drive just fine and it looks like the partitions and data are all there (except the drive letters and partition sizes are different.) So what could be causing the boot problem?

[TropicalBound]

Interesting. Try the Last Known Good Configuration.

[SuperSparks]

I'd say that Ghost corrupted something. I'd try re-imaging the drive again.

[Dickster]

Yes, I'll try again. I should probably also do a disk check on the original drive before cloning it.

[Dickster]

I tried cloning the drive again with the same result.

This time I let the system run after I got the blank screen and it did seem to be booting up, at least the drive activity light was blinking. Then the welcome screen came back on and it played the startup music, the screen flashed, and it played the shutdown music. This cycle kept repeating (startup-shutdown-startup-shutdown...) until I powered down the computer. Attempting to start in safe mode does the same thing (except without any music.)

What now?

[SuperSparks]

I'd say that the Ghost image itself is corrupt then

I think you need to do an over-the-top re-install of Windows XP here. Boot up with the XP CD in the drive and let Setup run. Go past the "C" and "R" repair options by pressing Enter just as if you're doing a clean install and you'll eventually get an option to "Repair an existing installation". That's the one you want. If it asks about formatting you've gone wrong, so start over.

You'll get to keep your existing apps & settings, but you need to re-install SP2, Windows Updates & any unsigned drivers afterwards. NOTE: Be aware that you'll lose any protection from Blaster / Sasser type worms. Don't go online without a firewall, whether the built in Windows one or 3rd party.

How to perform a re-install of WinXP

Repair XP

WinXP Non-destructive Total Rebuild