XP home won't boot :p

Someone dropped off two laptops with me...one that they had been using and the other which they had just bought. The new laptop is a Toshiba and the old is a Dell. He wanted me to get everything moved over(OS, data, etc) from one hardrive to the other.

His old laptop hard drive is an ATA, but his new one is a SATA...

Due to this, I needed to ghost his ATA drive to the SATA...but now, due to the change in hardware, the system is blue screening on the Toshiba with the new drive(old software setup). I know this is normal, so I ran chkdsk /r and attempted to do some repairs. It won't give me the option to do a "secondary" repair so I'm at a lose as nothing else worked. Would restoring to an old restore point help any? That would seem pointless.

His business relies on some software that he had on his drive, which he can't move..which is why he doesn't just move the data to a working partition/HDD. Is there an easier way to do this rather than hook it up as a slave on another machine and install the OS over the existing one(to avoid destroying his files)?

KG

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Comments

bighornsheep

Do not re-install Windows XP. You might overwrite some things in the registry causing some of the software to not work.

First of all, let me just say that your method of moving his OS isnt very technical. Ghost is a machine dependent backup software, imaging two different hdd for different machines like this isnt very good results-wise.

At this point, I would attempt to repair the Windows installation with the ORIGINAL XP DISC, make sure you get the same one that was used to install on the original ATA drive with, same service pack, same edition etc.

Do this on the new machine with the new hdd that has the image ghosted from his/her other drive.
Boot up the cd-rom, wait for all the files to load, press enter (PRESS ENTER, NOT RECOVERY CONSOLE), setup SHOULD detect that XP already exists, and shows you the path to windows. At this point, press 'R' key.

This might cause your installation to restart, and you will have to setup all the configurations again, but afterwards, you should be able to load all of the programs, files again without any trouble. Good luck.

dubbs112

I have heard of people with troubled winXP home machines boot to a winXP pro disc and do an upgrade to correct problems, without affecting installed programs.

bighornsheep

dubbs112 wrote:

I have heard of people with troubled winXP home machines boot to a winXP pro disc and do an upgrade to correct problems, without affecting installed programs.

Yes dubbs is correct, if you upgrade the new machine with problematic winxp home to winxp pro, setup should be able to fix the hardware library during the upgrade installation. That is another alternative besides doing the repair I talked about.

geekie

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/1999070716282425

Gives a good idea of the issues you will encounter when there are differences between source and destination computers.

I'd go with the XP upgrade and if that doesn't work try

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/mgrtfset.mspx

KGhaleon

Thanks, that helped me solve the problem. Thing is, I wasn't aware that the "repair" feature only worked with certain discs...I was using a non-dell XP home. I tried a Dell-specific disc and it is repairing like it should.

I know my method is crappy, but I don't know of a better way to move everything over without changing the structure of the drive. I normally just do a repair afterwards and that fixes things. When I see that the repair feature is missing, I usually think that it's the partition that's causing the problem.

bighornsheep

KGhaleon wrote:

Thanks, that helped me solve the problem. Thing is, I wasn't aware that the "repair" feature only worked with certain discs...I was using a non-dell XP home. I tried a Dell-specific disc and it is repairing like it should.

it's not so much that the repair only works with certain discs, it's that you want to preserve your Operating System as much as possible. If you have XP SP2 installed, but you use a SP1 disc to repair it, your computer will restart with corrupt DLLs. Or if you used a Dell-xp CD to install, they might included some drivers for their hardware, if you repair it with an OEM/Retail XP CD, it will not repair those drivers for you.

KGhaleon wrote:

I know my method is crappy, but I don't know of a better way to move everything over without changing the structure of the drive. I normally just do a repair afterwards and that fixes things. When I see that the repair feature is missing, I usually think that it's the partition that's causing the problem.

KG

the checkdisk only repairs harddrive/partition related issues, thus in this case because of the CPU/memory changes, checkdisk didnt do anything for you.

Speaking from experience, I wouldnt perform or promise any software restoration unless you are sure that it will work. That usually means never promise software restoration. Data backup is already troublesome enough...

But anyway, you're on the right track, dont feel bad because of one bad incident, keep up the good work! Good luck.