swapping hard disks

Hi all,

I hope some clever bod out there can help - I don't know what I'm doing so consequently am not getting too far.

I have a PC with a hard disk that has 3 partitions - Win7, WinXP and documents. This was getting a little full so I want to upgrade it.

I bought a 1Tb drive, installed and partitioned. Cloned the drives across. All looking good. I now had Drive letters from C to H (DVD drive unplugged at the mo). C,D.and E are the old drive and F,G and H are the new drive.

Unplugged the old drive and got an "NTLDR missing" error. Plugged it back in and all works on the old system.

Did some scratching round and found that I had to copy some system files across to the new boot drive. When I investigated further I found the systems files were (for some odd reason) on drive E. I've copied boot.ini, bootmgr, NTDETECT.COM and ntldt over to drive F.

I unplugged the old drive again and not it's complaining about changes of hardware and software. I'm guessing that I could be looking fr a boot drive (maybe E) that no longer exists because it's labelled differently (F). I may have to edit bootmgr??

My worry is that the Disk Management window looks subtly different and I may have set things up incorrectly.

Before I go to far down a dangerous path I wonder if anyone would have a look and give me some wisdom? I attach a picture of my Disk Manager (from Win 7) - I hope you'll be able to see what I mean.

Bob
PS - Actually this is my sons computer and I'm his dad trying to help but worried about messing it up for him!

bobharding said:

Hi all,

I hope some clever bod out there can help - I don't know what I'm doing so consequently am not getting too far.

I have a PC with a hard disk that has 3 partitions - Win7, WinXP and documents. This was getting a little full so I want to upgrade it.

I bought a 1Tb drive, installed and partitioned. Cloned the drives across. All looking good. I now had Drive letters from C to H (DVD drive unplugged at the mo). C,D.and E are the old drive and F,G and H are the new drive.

Unplugged the old drive and got an "NTLDR missing" error. Plugged it back in and all works on the old system.

Did some scratching round and found that I had to copy some system files across to the new boot drive. When I investigated further I found the systems files were (for some odd reason) on drive E. I've copied boot.ini, bootmgr, NTDETECT.COM and ntldt over to drive F.

I unplugged the old drive again and not it's complaining about changes of hardware and software. I'm guessing that I could be looking fr a boot drive (maybe E) that no longer exists because it's labelled differently (F). I may have to edit bootmgr??

My worry is that the Disk Management window looks subtly different and I may have set things up incorrectly.

Before I go to far down a dangerous path I wonder if anyone would have a look and give me some wisdom? I attach a picture of my Disk Manager (from Win 7) - I hope you'll be able to see what I mean.

Bob
PS - Actually this is my sons computer and I'm his dad trying to help but worried about messing it up for him!

Hi Bob and welcome

My only concern is the 2 logical partitions. Booting from logical can be a slight problem. Otherwise looks fine

Ken J+

Hi ZigZag,
As shown in the picture it works. The NTLDR files are on drive E but I notice that drive C is the boot drive - guess that this happened when I installed Win7 - I don't know

Each of the partitions on Drive 0 have been cloned to drive 1 and I now want to remove drive 0. When I remove drive 0 the machine won't boot. The question is .. "How can I make it boot without drive 0"

I'm still stuck. I'm keen to remove the original Hard Disk but if I do then the system won't boot

I'm guessing that this is a bit too tough for the gang out there - kind of makes me feel better.

Ihanks for looking guys - I guess I'll try a few other forums and post back here if I every get it sorted.