[bsantanu]

I have a laptop that was originally preinstalled with XP. I bought windows
vista home premium upgrade, and I have been using vista without any problems
for the past few months.

Unfortunately, it appears that my hard drive is starting to failue (at least
that is what vista is telling me), and so, I am trying to figure out how to
do that.

I tried using norton ghost version 12.0 (vista compatible). What I did is I
bought a new hard drive and a usb adapter. I used Norton ghost to copy the C
drive over to this drive (MBR and everything). I then took out my old C
Drive and then put in my new hard drive.

Unfortunately, while the new hard drive appears to boot initially, I get to
the welcome screen, then a message saying "preparing your desktop", and then
a blank blue screen w/o any error messages. Okay, what's weird is if I plug
in my old C drive via tje USB ADAPTER, then vista will see that USB drive and
boot normally. I can't count on this as a solution this drive appears to be
failing.

So, I went back to the drawing board. My laptop has two hard drives. I
took out my old D drive, and placed in my new hard drive. I then asked Vista
to do a clean install on this hard drive. Everything appears to go well.
Okay I swap out my old failing c Drive and place in my newly installed vista
installation. Now it says Boot manager is missing.

If I plop in my old C drive all my problems go away.

It seems that vista is married to this drive, and there does not appear to
be a way to unmarry it.

any ideas, as my hard drive i'm sure will die soon.

thanks

[Rich-M]

Either the mbr wasn't copied, or the bios is looking for the wrong drive. Once you put new drive into Laptop, checkl the bios to be certain it is recognizing the new drive and trying to boot to it.

[bsantanu]

thanks for the reply, were you responding to the ghost issue. if that's the case. norton ghost 12.0 has a MBR check, which I believe I checked (i've done it a few times now). Also, if i place the hard drive that I ghosted into the C slot. It DOES boot. it even goes through the whole process of the windows welcome screen, and then I get a message "preparing your desktop" and then I get a blank blue screen. This is not the BSOD, this is a blue screen within the vista GUI but there is absolutely nothing on it.

Regarding the windows clean install, i'm assuming that the windows for some reason is not installing a boot manager on my 2nd hard drive. maybe it's because it wants the C drive to be the booting device forever (piracy issues)

I'll play around with my laptop some more.

hopefully, someone can help. thanks

[JohnWill]

For the new disk that boots almost completely, try this.

Boot from an MS-DOS floppy, you can get one from www.bootdisk.com and do this:

FDISK /MBR

Try booting the new hard disk again.

[bsantanu]

Doh! My laptop did not come with a floppy. It's a good idea though. I'll have to think of something creative.

Does anyone know the official microsoft procedure for doing this?

I can't seem to find it on their web site. You would think hard drive failure and transferring windows is something they should have anticipated. Maybe i'm missing something obvious (wouldn't be the 1st time).

Thanks

[JohnWill]

Can you do the GHOST process again, but this time make sure the target drive is NOT assigned a drive letter. The best way to do that is to remove all the partitions on the drive and start with a clean drive in the cloning process.

[DaveBurnett]

And run Ghost from the CD NOT from within your OS

[bsantanu]

Hi couple of things. I am using Norton ghost 12.0 (this is the latest version).

I reformated my new hard hard drive. Ghost 12.0 will not let you copy the drive from the CD (sounds kind of silly, there has to be a way, I haven't figured it out yet). I did another ghost copy within the vista os, and unfortunately, it will NOT let me assign a target letter.

If I take everything out, and put in only my new hard drive that has been ghosted. The following sequence of events happens. windows boots --> black vista sreen with the rolling bar at the bottom --> blue welcome screen --> preparing your desktop screen --> blank blue screen, not BSOD. that's it, end game. no UI, no nothing. Now if I press ctrl, alt, delete I can get the task manager, and I can even get to the command prompt.

Guess what? the only drive in my laptop is assinged to be E: I'm trying to figure out how to fix this. Using the vista CD, and it's repair function is no use b/c vista thinks that it is booting fine.

I looked around and I found that other people did the following from the command prompt:

BCDEDIT /set {bootmgr} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} osdevice boot

This has not helped me. My new hard drive still is assigned as E, and I still can boot up to the blank E screen.

Any ideas?

[bsantanu]

thanks for your help, I finally got it working, but not the way I had originally intended. I'll admit, there were some bone-head things on my part, but hopefully people can learn from me.

So, I gave up on ghosting. It would have been nice if I found a way to work. I hate having to reinstall ALL my programs again! if anyone has found success using norton ghost 12.0 let me know.

So I just reformatted the hard drive, and installed vista onto the new hard drive. Remember, at this point my old hard drive is committed to C, my data drive is at d, and my new hard drive (soon to be primary hard drive) is at e.

So I swap out my old failing hard drive, and put in my new hard drive.. Guess what. the thing says bootmgr not detected!! I think Darrell Gorter said to use the windows DVD and use the repair fxn. And I did before, without any results. However, (and here's the bonehead thing on my part). It says when its performing a repair, that it may have to restart and repair more than once.

On the previous tries, I had only given the repair fxn one try before I moved on. Okay, so I let the windows dvd repair my new hard drive two times... take out my dvd.... reboot... and Voila. It boots correctly, albeit without any of my programs, but thats better than a crashed hard drive!

So, i'm done right... not exactly. So, my windows drive is still set to E. Doh! actually, i could have just left this alone, as it appeared that everything was working fine.

However, I wanted to try a tip i had read on the windows help forum... that is going into the registry and deleting the mounted devices section. So, I did that, and rebooted.....

Okay it boots.... black screen with scrolling bar at the bottom.... welcome screen..... preparing your desktop screen (uh oh).... and then blank blue screen with with just the mouse cursor (i start swearing!, i could have left it alone, but i just had to meddle).

Well, i can still access the task manager through the blue screen (ctr+alt+del), and I run command. I see that at least vista has reset my hard drive to C:!!! So, now I reinstalled vista over this drive, and voila, I have my new hard drive.

I had to go through the pains of reactivating the software and reinstalling my programs, but I did it!

So, here's what worked for me.

If vista says your hard drive is failing and you need to switch hard drives, then here are my steps to success. I was lucky because my notebook had two hard drive slots.

1. Your old hard drive should already be in slot 1. Place your new hard drive in slot 2. ( I had to take out my data hard drive for this step).
2. install windows into the new hard drive. (I would have liked to do it via USB, but vista does not allow you to do this)
3. take out the old hard drive and put the new hard drive in slot 1.
4. make the registry changes as noted above (go into HKLM via regedit and delete dosdevices
5. reinstall windows onto the same drive.
6. reactivate, you will probably have to call vista to ask for a new key
7. reinstall your programs.

I'm sure there is an easier way. Like I said,earlier I had hoped to use ghost so I wouldn't have had to deal with these issues. There probably is an easier way within windows. Hopefully, this feedback will help future users, and hopefully microsoft will develop a more straightforward way of upgrading hard drives as hard drive failures on notebooks are way too common.