Clone XP hard drive

I have a 80GB hard drive on my ECS N2U400-A,Nforce2 partitioned into C(25gb),D(25gb)&E(the rest) (fat32)with XP home upgrade (orignal install was Win98SE). OK I bought a 250 GB Seagate and tried to clone xp with the seagate software (formated in 3 partitons fat32)first in windows then in DOS, didn't work drive won't boot, says "insert operating disk" or something like that. Tried with Ghost in Norton system works 2003 version 8 I think, couldn't get that to work either. Any special things I need to do? I am about ready to install from scratch.

 

Hi Hotlynx16 and welcome.

You will have to initialize that new HDD for the NT system. When you installed it and formatted it using Win98 and DOS, that was your mistake. That prepared the drive for booting a Win98 dos based system. The MBR code (IPL) is different than the NT MBR code. You normally would use the Seagate software to do the prep as well as the cloning. It would have asked what OS you planned on using and reacted accordingly. If you have faith in the cloning having taken place without any errors, then all you need to do is fix the MBR code (IPL).

You can do that a number of ways. If you have the XP install CD, boot to it and start a Recovery Console session. Then run the command fixmbr C: and then run the fixboot command also. For info on those commands look here. The fixboot alone is probably all you need but run them both for good measure.
If that doesn't work, it may be easier to abandon the repair effort and go back to the Seagate software and re-install the drive. It should allow you to wipe it out and begin anew. This time elect to have it prepare the drive for XP.

Post back if you still have problems. There are other methods that can work when the RC can't handle it.