[llOriginll]

Hey all,

Bought a new 500 Gig Seagate Hard-Drive to replace my Maxtor 250 Gig Hard-Drive.

Plugged it in the second HDD slot and powered it up as the slave to the master (ie, the maxtor is master/seagate is slave) and used Windows Disk Management to activate it, format it to NTFS (same as Maxtor) and then used this to clone it.

That worked fine, however when I remove the Maxtor and attempt to boot up from the Seagate, BIOS detects it, I can set it as master, but any time it attempts to boot from it or I ask it to boot from it it demands that I "insert system disk and press enter" as if it's booting from the CD-drive?

I thought maybe I need to somehow changed Seagate which is F: to C:? But I have no idea how to do this or what I'm missing here... I mean surely the straight clone should just think it is the C:?

Cheers,

Chris

[crjdriver]

OK, one BIG problem. You do not partition or format when you clone a drive. This will guarantee you problems. Here is what I would do;

1 Remove ALL partition info from the new drive. You can zero it or just delete all partitions.
2 Clone the drive
3 Once done with the clone, shutdown DO NOT reboot with both drives connected. Now pull the pw connector from the old drive.
4 Pw ON and enter the bios. Make sure the new drive is selected as the boot hd.
5 Boot system and make sure everything works; ie drive letters are correct, etc.

If all is well, you can now pw down and reconnect the old drive or just remove it.

[crjdriver]

BTW I use and recommend acronis true image for the above task. There are other apps however acronis is like snap-on tools; it just works no problems.

[llOriginll]

Cool; will follow this, just one quick question: how do I remove any partitions? The idea of a 'partition' still confuses me, from what I can see it's effectively one hard drive block? How do I 'zero' it? Do I need to delete everything as well? Basically your steps all make sense, I'm just confused by number 1 :P

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[managed]

What OS are you cloning ? XP is ok but Vista or 7 are more tricky.

If you are doing this from within XP then DriveImage XML requires a partition on the destination drive, unlike other cloning programs.

Use XP's Disk Management to delete all the partitions on the destination drive then create a new partition for the clone, no need to format it. It should be of equal or greater size than the source partition.
Use DriveImage XML's Drive to Drive mode to make the clone, don't use the Raw option, use Hot Imaging.

When done use XP's Disk Management to make the newly cloned partition Active or it will not boot.

Power off, disconnect the original drive and you should be able to boot the clone.
The original drive must be disconnected the first time the clone boots, after that you can reconnect it.

[llOriginll]

Thanks for your suggestions guys, it's now working!

I'll be honest managed that no matter what I did with XML it refused to work, so after switching to Acronis it worked flawlessly, and am now enjoying a two disc setup

Thanks for the advice!

[llOriginll]

Tha

[crjdriver]

As I said, it [acronis] just works no problems.