[31770b]

Hello guys i purchased a new hdd today (Samsung spinpoint f3) and connected it up to my computer, ran norton ghost ( made a copy of my old hdd onto the new ). and plugged the hdd in.......

now when i turn my pc on i get this error after it says "Verfifing dmi pool data (or w/e)"- DIskboot failure, insert system disk -

at the moment ive plugged my old hard drive in and i can boot and acess my new drive in my computer. also the new drive is set as primary

With and without my old hdd plugged in, i can acess the bios and it recongizes my new HDD.

Boot order is - Hard disk, SATA CD Rom, DVD drive

old hard drive is a sata seagate baracuda 250gb. Running vista 64

any other questions please ask

Regards, a very frustrated man named Ollie May Johnson Nesbit.

[31770b]

anyone? i've been googling for 7 hours straight once again and its seriously insanley annoying #

also; the hdd isnt failed and no i dont have a windows install disk nor do i want to buy one.

heres a question - if i were to buy a windows 7 installation disk (keep in mind i cant get onto windows) i could wipe it and install w7 clean, yeah ? but, then would i be able to plug my old hdd in (it has vista installed on it) and copy all my program files to the new hdd with w7 on, without W7 conflicting with vista? i'd plug the oldd hdd in whilst computer is off coz i cba electrocuting my self loll, so what would happen when i start my pc :S I'd rather fix it without doing that though coz i dont want to waste my money a damn OS.. got other things to buy -_-

[aasimenator]

You could have posted your problem here 7 hours ago & you'd have got the solution
When you plugged in the new hard drive it became the primary drive in your bios so all you need to do is change the Hard drive priority to seagate 250GB, Hard drive priority will be found under Boot menu in BIOS,

[31770b]

and that solves what? anyway ive just done it, Spinpoint is still primary.

What i want to acclomplish is having the new hdd in ONLY. i dont want my old one plugged in! BTW ive checked processes and opened file location, they're running on the new drive.

But the new drive its self cant boot windows

And neither can only my old one now, all i get is windows vista error, failed to load winload.exe.. i think this is because windows is trying to boot it from my new drive coz its primary, even though its not plugged in? ive also messed with the Windows folder on both hdds so im unsure

so at the minute i have BOTH plugged in

also when i did the cloning i didnt select copy MBR when i should of..

SO CONFUSING !!! I was thinkin about a logical way to fix it, by plugging old hdd only so windows boots from that, and plugging the new one in whilst running and trying to re-clone but now like i said with old one in only i get black dos screen with vista error

[aasimenator]

get Windows Vista DVD boot from it & select Repair Windows. It will probably fix this issue.

[31770b]

hello mate, ty for ur help, anyway very surprisingly i actually found my vista CD.

it didnt work, when i booted the cd as usual it said loading windows files blablabla, then loaded the blue vista screen but with no options. just the blue vista screen and a cursor.

I tried booting with:
old hdd only, new hdd only, both hdds. checked the disks condition, cleaned it and tried again

nothing worked

i have a feeling windows is using files from each drive to load up.. its very laggy booting up and my firefox flash plugin dissapeared and things like programs with "auto remmeber password" are blank :S

im hoping someone can provide me with a soulution because im so confused

[31770b]

ANYONE ? i need major help!! anyone can tell me other forums to post on then ?

ALSO i just installed vista whilst logged into windows with both hdds in (remember thats the onlyn way i can boot) and it did nothing to help the problem.. only made it worse since now i have to set drivers and programs up again FFS

[Elvandil]

Clearly the ghosting operation failed. How did you do it? It needs to be done again unless you are sure you did it right the first time.

Can you see all the correct files and folders on the drive, or is it a ghost image?

Have you made the partition active?

Did you boot into Windows before exchanging the new drive with the old?

[31770b]

hello and ty for your reply, i just plugged my new hdd in, opened up ghost and clicked "Copy drive" and selected the destination as the new one. there was a lot of advanced options but i didnt select any and left them all at default. one of them "Copy MBR" or something, i think i was supposed to select that

yes i can see my files as normal

partion active? not sure what you mean, i went into disk management and selected "Extend data"(or something) because after i had cloned it was showing the drive as 230gb.

and did i boot into windows before.. i dont think so but i honestly cant remember, maybe i restarted i dont know. but after i had done the clone i took the old one out and plugged the new in, only to recieve the boot error im having. but yeah maybe i restarted before hand

im so stumped on how to fix this

[Elvandil]

The cloning should be done without Windows running if at all possible (from the boot CD). Then, you should not boot to Windows until the colne has been placed in the position of the original to avoiud problems with Windows assigning drive letters to the partitions.

Then, if the partition is not "active" it has to have that flag set so the machine knows that the partition is bootable. Making it active may have been one of that advanced options. But it can be done laster if you don't want to start over. You have to boot into the Rercovery Console and then from there, enter the Diskpart console.

diskpart.exe (Opens diskpart console)

list disk

(Assuming disk1)

select disk 1

list partition

(Assuming partition1 )

select partition 1

active

exit

[31770b]

hello, the recovery is built into the vista cd right ? when i try to boot from that all that i see is the blue screen and a cursor with 0 options. i dont have a ghost cd either

[Elvandil]

You should be able to boot up the whole Vista recovery environment. Are you sure you are booting from the DVD? It's a DVD. Is it a DVD drive?

[31770b]

its a dvd drive yeah and yes its a dvd :P its the windows vista installation dvd, all shiny on the outside and whatnot

im running home premium 64bit if that helps

i think my computer is using files from both windows folders on both drives

[31770b]

hey. i could boot up the vista cd afterall - wasnt giving it long enough to load

anyway so i tried using auto repair with new and old hdds only and both plugged in, no luck

also tried what Elvandil said, did this with my new hdd plugged in but it had no effect

i noticed it was disk 0 aswell, is this normal or should they be 1 and 2 ?

what are my other options?

[Elvandil]

0 is fine. Doesn't matter what they are called.

I'd start the whole process over. You might want to try a different tool instead of Ghost. If you can boot up the old drive, many people have had good luck with the free version of XXClone. It can also be done from the booted Parted Magic disk partitoning tool (Bootable CD image).

Whichever you choose, remember that you are trying to make an exact copy. That means that the OS is not going to like having 2 identical drives attached to it. So once the cloning is done, put the clone in the position of the original before booting it up so that the OS does not make changes to the drive to distinguish it from the original.

Some cloners allow the direct cloning of a smaller partition to a larger one. But if the one you choose only allows cloning to one of the same size, leave it that way until you get booted. Once it boots, you can then expand the partition to fill the other space. It is harder to troubleshoot the problems if too many changes are made at the same time. So clone first and worry about expanding the partitions afterward.

Free Drive Cloners/Imagers:

Easeus Disk Copy
O&O DiskImage Express
Runtime Shadow Copy
Dr. Freeware boot CD (also has file recovery, Avast scanner, and partitioning tools)
EASEUS Todo Backup (Partition and drive imaging)
EASEUS Disk Copy (Partition and drive cloning)
Farstone Driveclone Express
Macrium Reflect
Paragon Drive Backup Express
G4U - Ghost For Unix (Platform-independent, floppy or CD)
Clonezilla (Bare-metal restoration from image)
Partimage
Dubaron Diskimage
SystemRescueCD
EaseUs Disk Copy (Copies disks or partitions)
XXClone
CloneZilla GParted LiveCD (Complete partitioning and drive imaging/restoration tools)
Drive Image XML
Partition Saving
PCI CloneMaxx
HDClone
DriveClonerXP
Self-Image
copyr.dma (Copies disk with bad sectors for recovery)
DiscWizard (For Seagate or Maxtor drives - contains reduced version of Acronis)

Commercial Apps:

EMC (Dantz) Retrospect
Casper
NTI Backup Now (Image Edition)
XXClone Pro (One of the fastest incremental backups)
JustBoot Disk Backuper
ASIS Backup (Bootable disk image)
Paragon Drive Backup
DT Utilities PC Backup Pro (formerly, Migo PC Backup)
Easy Image
Active@ Disk Image
O&O DiskImage
Acronis True Image Home
Farstone Drive Clone (Drive image, snapshots, file/folder backups.)
EAZ-FIX Professional and Easy Image
Drive Snapshot
ShadowProtect (Also online backups.)
Keriver Image
Avanquest Copy Commander
Paragon Drive Backup
NovaBackup
R-Drive Image
Norton Ghost
HDClone Pro or Enterprise
Terabyte Image for Windows
Terabyte Image for DOS (can directly access FAT, FAT32, and NTFS partitions)
Spotmau Disk Clone & Backup