[SteveNimmons]

I've just installed a 500GB drive in an XP desktop. The drive is being seen ok (read/write/access all fine), and I have formatted for NTFS. I used Norton Ghost to backup a smaller drive (80GB) which is the primary master onto the 500GB which is the secondary master. BIOS seems fine and dandy as well.


I tried creating the secondary master as a boot disk, using a smart copy and then an exact bit by bit image. In both cases the resultant drive fails to boot the operating system. I get an XP screen with the logo much smaller than usual and then nothing.


I checked the Master Boot Record on both and they look 'ok', but the help for the Hitachi drive is suggesting I need to do a Master Boot Record refresh with fdisk. Has anyone seen anything similar to this in the past and could offer some troubleshooting advice. The machine I'm looking at has restore disks and not the original OS boot disks so I don't have access to fdisk (is there somewhere I can grab this?).


All thoughts / advice gratefully received.


thx...

[SteveNimmons]

Happy to report recent success on this. I had to refresh the Master Boot Record on the destination disk after I had completed the copy using Norton Ghost (10.0). I managed to get a download that allowed me to create a Windows98 boot disk and I ran fdisk from there. I disconnected the source disk just in case, as I didn't fancy accidently re-writing the MBR of the working drive.

This is where I found the fdisk utils. I booted on the floppy, ran fdisk /mbr from the dos shell (takes a couple of seconds only), and then booted up using the new hard drive. All is now working :)

www.svrops.com/svrops/dwnlddisk.htm