I think I have a complex one here.

I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode.
I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma that I'm having.

My old drive an IDE 100GB IBM primary drive was partitioned into 3 parts:
c: 30GB FAT32 primary
d: 30GB FAT32 "
e: 30gb FAT32 "

All ran great in XP's on c: ,D: and :e except that i was running out of room in all the partitions and the drive is getting very old , I think (5yrs).

I used XXClone Pro v.0.58.0 to clone my old c: and d: partitions to a WD IDE 160GB. I tried many other cloning proggys like Acronis True Image, Drive Clone, Paragon Drive Copy, Drive Image 2002, HDClone 3.1 Pro but they all either changed my new drive NTFS file system to FAT32 or made exact same size copies. I formatted and partitioned my new drive as follows:
New Drive - 160GB WD IDE
c: 75GB NTFS primary "set as active"
d: 75GB NTFS primary
I don't care about old e: partition.

After cloning c: and d: from my old drive I unplugged the old drive from the primary master ribbon and plugged in the new drive. booted in to XP Pro on c: drive. Went into Disk Mangmt and noticed that there was no D: drive.The D: drive stayed as the f: drive from when I was cloning my old D: to the NEW WD F: drive which is suppose to be the d: drive now. So, i assigned it d:
Than went into the boot.INI file and added the the Dual boot lines because it appeared that it didn't copy the boot.ini file from my old IBM c: drive. So I changed the old boot.ini to the new one, here are the examples.

old Boot.ini file

[Boot Loader]
Timeout=10
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S

[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XXCLO NE: (Cloned Volume) [d:0,p:1] \WINDOWS" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

New Boot.ini file

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="MS Windows XP Pro Gaming System" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(2)\WINDOWS="MS Windows XP Pro NTFS on SATA" /fastdetect


Tried to boot into d: drive with no luck. Hangs on blue screen while playing continuous windows startup and shutdown sounds.

Thnx for your help and time, Rezzen

You should have left the partition as F and not make it D. What you did up to this point was ok. You formatted and created 2 partitions instead of 3 and you changed the file system from FAT to NTFS. However, when you cloned the disk F was assigned to the second partition. The fact that upon formating the new disk the second partition was assigned the letter D is not important. Try to format the disk again, recreate the partitions and recopy the clones one to each partition. Let windows assign the letters and do not change them.

Thx for the reply Skeptic,
What I didn't mention is when I tried to boot with the F: drive it went to a black screen and gave a missing file error. I don't remember which file , I think it was ntldr file. Then when I changed it to D; it at least started to boot.
thx

Try to fixs ntldr from this link. Copy the file to the partition inwhich the non-working OS is. Mark the problematic partition F again and return boot.ini to what it was. If you do not succeed try the process from beginning.

Generally speaking cloning is quite a tricky business. It works well when the "de-ghosting" (or whatever it may be called) is straight forward, meaning no changes are made to hardware, mbr, partitions etc . When you do make changes like you did in the number of partitions, file system etc. many problems can happen.

Let us know if fixing ntldr helped.

This post has been edited by The Skeptic: Apr 3 2007, 04:19 PM

I did change it back to F: drive and placed the new ntldr in the root dir of F: and it still gave me the same ntldr missing error. I will try to reclone drive c: and d: again. Any suggestions on cloning software that will do what I need it to do?
thx for you help and time.