[birdiee09]

Hello,

I have a Dell Dimension 4600. I got a new 80gb hard drive and wanted to clone it with the current 20gb drive. I took both drives and connected them to a different pc that had norton ghost on it. After cloning, which went fine, I placed them back into the Dell with the 80 gig set as master, and the 20gb set as slave. The computer would post normally and boot to a black screen with a blinking cursor, this happned right after verifying dmi data pool. It would hang at this screen never getting to the windows loading screen.

I returned the 20gb to the master drive and set the 80gb as the slave. It booted fine. After getting into windows I saw it was reporting the 80gb as C: and the 20gb as D:. I changed the drive letter of the 80gb (in safe mode) to G:. After changing it the computer would freeze at the XP splash screen, however I still had control of the mouse. I believe this was caused from windows search for the page file on C: which no longer existed.

I did a repair install on the 20gb. It set the drive as G:. It booted fine and now my programs do not work. I used regedit to manually change the drive letter of the boot device and it is now freezing during the XP splash screen against still having control of the mouse.

How can I change the boot drive letter without booting into windows on that drive?

How can I change the location windows looks for the page file?

I made an image of the drive before atempting the repair install. I reimaged the 20gb drive but it still freezing at the XP splash screen. I cannot use a repair install or do a fresh install. The drive contains a very expensive database program that cannot be reinstalled.

I have tried FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, BOOTCFG, FDISK /MBR, CHKDSK /F /R, and I have tried putting the drive into other machines.

Any suggestions and help would be very much appreciated.

[DaveBurnett]

I made the same mistake yesterday.
Having used Ghost to clone a version of Windows, you MUST NOT put the old drive back into the machine until you have started from the new drive on its own at least once.

Fortunately for me, I realized what I had done before I started to change things and could redo the Ghost.
I have a feeling you are going to have to do a repair install.