For my first post, I give you a quandry, or at least it is to me.

I recently purchased a WD 500GB Caviar Blue Sata2 drive to install in my system. Main drive currently is a Maxtor 300GB DiamondMax 10. I used Partition Magic to format the new drive, and then copy all of the data from my old Maxtor to the new Western Digital drive. That has been done quite successfully. Both drives show in Partition Magic as having primary partitions and both are active. For some reason though I can't get the machine to boot to Windows on the new WD drive. To facilitate this, I shut down the machine, and physically unplug the old Maxtor drive. When booting, I make sure that the Bios boot order is to the new WD drive. Everything seems to be good at first. I get the usual progress bar across the bottom of the screen. and then the windows logo. That disappears, and the cursor shows up in the middle of a grey screen. This seems to be where things stay. I do not get a Windows welcome screen or a login box at all.

Anyone with any ideas on this??

How did you copy the one drive to the other? Did you use any cloning program like Ghost?

I used the partion copy option in Partition Magic 8.0

I am not familiar with the option yoi used but generally speaking, copying a partition will not create a bootable disk. For this you need a cloning program like Symantec Ghost (not free) or DriveImage XML (free).

I’ve used PQ8 many times to copy boot partitions without any problem, found this at their site
Are both drives SATA drives


Will PartitionMagic work on any size hard drive
PartitionMagic 8.0 has been tested and is supported on drives up to 300 GB when the partition is less than 90 percent full. Larger hard drives may require additional memory. For more information, see the document New features in Norton PartitionMagic 8.0.




Using the CHKBTINI Utility to fix the Boot.ini file

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/power...hho&src=hot

Download and use the Chkbtini.exe file

Click the button to download ChkBtIni.zip file
Extract the ChkBtIni.exe file to a DOS boot disk
Boot the computer from the DOS boot disk
At the command prompt, type the following
chkbtini -fix

This post has been edited by peter99: Aug 13 2008, 06:29 AM

Both drives are Sata. Maxtor is Sata 1, and the ED drive is Sata 2. I plan on upgrading pretty soon, and wanted a Sata2 drive in the new machine.

Created a dos boot disk and there isn't enough room on the disk to put chkbtini.exe.

How to create a basic bootdisk
After using XP to create a dos bootdisk

In windows explorer go to tools folder options
View tab and untick hide protected operating system files
And tick the box show hidden files and folders

Go to the floppy drive and

Delete all files except

Command.com
Io.sys
Msdos.sys

Copy and paste
chkbtini.exe to the floppy

change boot order in the BIOS to floppy first

I’ve just tried this and it booted to the floppy drive OK

I hope you do not mind me popping on this thread. But here is what I'm dealing with;

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/IBM-R51E-Fo...96#entry1328596

I too have the Partition Magic 8.0 program. Do you think I would have any luck using it?