Drive imaged new harddrive problems

Sorry that this is quite long but I thought I would give all the info I possibly could.
To make matters easy I am naming the drives A and B.

Just built a new pc with my sister, motherboard abit NF7s V2, Athlon xp 3200, 512 mg ddr Crucial ram,Radeon 9800 se graphic card, 2 x 160 gig Maxtor hard-drives plus a 20gig for backups and 3 removable drive tray drawers, win xp home, using on-board sound at the moment.

Every thing is working fine,as far as the pc is concerned.

Set up Windows xp, installed all anti spyware and adaware programs, firewall, antivirus etc. all ok and working.
Did a drive image after xp install and after security programs.

Drive B was to be a copy of drive A. The idea was that 2 users could put their own drive in the pc and boot it with their own programs and settings. My sister was fed with her partner messing up their pc and having to fix it if he got a virus etc. All went well in the setting up of drive A.

I have done this before and both drives worked fine.

Drive B was set as master, formated and partitioned in ntfs using the maxblast3 floppy utility, the same as drive A . The 1st partition was a primary partition for windows the remainder being logical drives for programs and data.

After formating drive B we made it a secondary slave and drive A was set to the master.
Booted into windows xp, all working fine, windows recognised drive B, and we proceeded to put the drive image of A onto B. Shut down, removed the drives, changed drive B to master,inserted it into the pc , booted up, the bios sees the drive correctly, but it would not boot to windows, it just sit there with the blue bar constantly trying to load xp.
Tried to boot to safe mode, it wouldn't load, tried booting with the xp cd it wouldn't load.
Tried booting with drive A into windows, with drive B as a slave, windows loads but doesn't see drive B, looked in computer management it only shows one drive,drive A.

Thought it might be the drawer, so put drive B into an external hard-drive caddy, windows still didn't see the drive. OK, something has gone wrong, will reformat the drive via a boot disk and start again.

Not as easy as that!!

The problems really began then, with the drive B set as master, we put in the maxblast3 floppy boot disk to reformat, it won't load, tried WinME boot disk, Win98 bootdisk they wouldn't load (although all boot disks load with drive A).
We then put in the drive image boot disk which loads and then asks for the drive image programs disk but this doesn't load.

Checked drive B with drive fitness test which loaded from the floppy drive and came up with code 0x00 which means no error, command completely successful.

Help please, Any ideas??????

Would be really grateful for some help on what to try next or how we can proceed with a format of the drive, could it be the mbr????

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

Hi Morg,

Are the drives identical, same model? If not you will need to go into the BIOS settings when changing the drives and run "Autodetect Drive" if the BIOS has it. EDIT: have you changed, or do you need to change, the jumpers.

Most probable cause is that the Maxblast Dynamic Drive Overlay (EZ-BIOS) has been installed. The DDO does not handle changes in cofiguration and I think you are right that the MBR is now corrupt. Since Maxblast itself no longer "sees" the drive I think you have lost the data on it, if it did see the drive you could try reinstalling the DDO. Only way out may be to do a low-level format using the PowerMax program (as long as that can see the drive ). You may want to email Maxtor and see if they can help. You may end up having to RMA it.

As for drive A, if it has a DDO installed, cut your losses and get rid of it. Sounds like you are going to be doing a lot of drive swapping and it will probably fail when you have the most UNbacked-up data on it.

My suggestion would be to get a dual-boot system for those two drives. I know XP pro has inbuilt dual-boot capabilities, I am not sure about XP Home (search MS for "multiple boot "). Otherwise there are 3rd party boot loaders (a program called BootUS was free last time I looked, but I have not tried it).
mmmm...booting to two different installs of the same OS, I think you can do it (??), also, does it work with the Windows licence agreement?

powermax:
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

Uninstall EZ-BIOS

Matt

 

Hi mattman,

Thanks for the reply, the drives are exactly the same model, the bios is set to autdetect, and the jumpers on the B drive were changed from slave to master as necessary.

On my pc I have successfully used this system for over a year now with no problems, the drives are held in drawers which which slide in and out of the caddies, therefore only one master is in the machine at any one time. We use the draws as my husband is copying our family video collection to dvd and needs different programs on his drive that I don't need, and he needs a lot of storage for them so he uses different harddrives in the 2nd drawer as slaves for the video to be saved on.

As far as microsoft licence is concerned the way I read it is that the operating system can only be installed on one pc, well I only have it on one pc??

Will go and get the programs you suggest and will let you know what happens

Thanks,

 

Mattman is right on the money - this is bad news way to set up a drive and some of these lessons unfortunately come the hard way. If you have another machine - install either of those drives jumpered as a slave - you may be able to clean (one at a time) them up using a Win98 boot disk and FDISKing. You can definately clean them up with Power Quest's Partition Magic. Assuming you get the job done, next time around jumper your drives as cable select, install XP on one of them and load all of your programs. Then image your drive and remove it. Insert the second drive and restore the image. Then both are set with an active partition and are identical in terms of content including your single liscence XP. Don't try to use both drives at the same time - your removable bay should have keys to complete/close the circuit so leave the second drive unlocked unless you want to use it - then remove the first, replace it with the second and put the first into #2's postion and leave it unlocked. Then lock #2 in #1's tray and fire that puppy back up.

When using removables, CS is the only to go. In my book, its the only way to go whether one is using removables or not.

 

Solved the problem

Hi Mattman,

Thanks for you help, I have now solved the problem using your suggestion.

It was the maxblast DDO having problems with DriveImage.

I removed the maxblast DDO.

I downloaded their powermax utility and checked the drive out with this, which was ok, I did the low-level format on the drive, then made the bad drive a slave, booted up with the good drive, and installed Paragon’s Partition Manager v 5.5 demo on the good drive which was suggested by someone on another forum, this saw the dud drive and I formated it using this. I could then use the DriveImage floppy boot disk in dos, and restored the driveimages. Changed the B drive to master, booted up and all is working fine.

Will remove the Maxblast3 DDO from the good drive using the Maxblast3 removal tool which is on the floppy, and will do the same on my drives. Wish Maxtor had a warning about this before I used the maxblast3 utility
Thanks a lot for your help.

Hi Rockster2U,

Thanks for the info, I had already installed XP on the good drive and had loaded all of the programs. Then I imaged the drive. I then inserted the B drive as a slave and restored the image. Both were set with an active partition and were identical in terms of content, but for some reason the maxblast3 software caused some sort of error. I didn't use jumper select as I had read somewhere that this caused problems. Are you saying that I should set the jumpers to cable select now, or leave them as masters, both drives have the same partitions and sizes, and only 1 drive is used in the pc at any time. The only difference will be that each drive now will have its own programs and data on it and will be drive imaged independently.

 

As stated prviously, I use CS on all HDD setups. This makes life very simple, especially when using removable bays and moving drives around - they are always going to be recognizable and free of any conflicts. The only drives I am aware of that had known problems with CS were older (about 3 years ago) IBM Deskstars manufactured in Malaysia. Most will add that CS jumpering improves performance although you couldn't prove that by me.

Just remember, the drive on the terminating connector will be recognized as your master and the drive on the middle (called the first) connector will be recognized as your slave.

Glad you got things figured out - I avoid those third party programs (drive overlays) like the plague. Major pain in the arse.

 

morg, thanks for posting back with the desciption of your method, well done! I have not tackled EZ-BIOS for a long time and I remember it was a gigantic headache, also, I did not have the removal instructions then, so I was learning as I went.

Great added info Rockster!

I'm saving this thread in my records

Matt

 

Hi Morg.

Great setup. I have my C drive on a tray and interchange several hdds depending on what I'm running at that time. Xp or Server-2003 or Linux. All my hdds are in trays which gives me great flexibility and drive imaging convenience.

One note. If you're using the $7.00 trays from Newegg be sure and unplug and/or remove the small fans at the rear. They have a history of messing up the signals between the hdds and the motherboard. Many a problem has been solved by removing the small fans. These are very good trays otherwise and I've never seen one break.

giles