cloned windows xp drive will not boot
I need a little help with this. I have cloned the hard drive from a HP Windows XP computer. I put the clone drive into the computer and it will not boot. All I get is a blinking curser. If I put the drive into another computer, My Computer and Disk Management sees the drive and I can open and explore the contents. I can install the original drive and it boots ok. I have tried to fix the MBR with fixmbr, and restored the drive from a disk backup with no success. I have used this program several times and not seen this. Any help would be appreciated.
AOMEI Backupper Std 3.2
AOMEI Partition Assistant Std 6.0
Comments
Has the new disk MBR or GPT as partition style? It should be MBR.
I'm not sure what GPT is or how to tell but I think it is MBR
The computer doesn't have UEFI bios and I don't think I checked the box to make this UEFI compatible.
The drive could be initialized on another PC, I don't know. You can check in AOMEI (clone) what it reads as destination disk. Just to be sure. GPT will never work in XP32 but will on all other versions. By the way, how big is your new disk, maybe it is too big for XP?
I'll give you a play by play. I left out details because this can get a little long.
1. Booted problem HP computer and attempted to clone 20g hard drive to 32g thumb drive from within Windows XP computer. Attempted clone failed. Error message, something about bad sector's.
2. Reformatted thumb drive and made a regular backup from within windows, source disk to thumb drive, success.
3. Recovered backup to a known good IDE 40g hard drive within a heathy Dell Windows XP computer.
4. Installed 40g hard drive into problem HP computer and wouldn't boot. Just got the blinking cursor.
5. Installed both problem HP and good used 40g drives into heathy Dell computer and cloned source HP drive to reformatted good used 40g drive success, no errors.
6. Installed clone 40g drive into problem HP computer and same thing, no boot.
7. I did the fixmbr thing with install disk within the problem HP computer with success , no errors. The HP computer still wouldn't boot.
I looked and Partition Assistant from within the heathy Dell computer reports the clone drive is Basic MBR, status active.
By the way this is XP32
Maybe you should make a System Backup of the system partition first and then Partition Backups of all other partitions that may be present on the problem drive.
After that do a restore of the System Backup with universal restore ticked on. And maybe then do the restore of any other partition to the new healthy drive.
Of course before any restoring first make the new drive completely empty so that there are no leftover partitions of any previous attempts. You can do this with AOMEI Partition Assistant.
Because old and new disks are not 100% the same a clone backup might fail.
@Mike50 You do the disk backup of the HP windows XP system computer, right? Now you do the restore in the HP windows XP system computer? Sorry we do not get you very clearly. Which computer you do the bakckup, which computer you do the restore? Which computer now you want to boot? You do them in the same computer? Please check your 40gb disk is MBR or GPT?
OK after a little soul searching I decided to cut my losses and reinstall XP. I guess maybe its possible there were problems with the old XP installation that was preventing me from cloning to a larger hard drive. I was able to backup and migrate the data to the new install. Thanks for the help maybe we can figure this out another time