WD Hard Drive Issues

Hello all,

I'm new to this board, and I primarily joined it to see if I could get some help. It seems like a very pleasant place.

Anywho, I've recently purchased a Western Digital 320g SE16 Hard Drive with a vague idea of what to do. My old hard drive, which is a motley 40gb, is robust and has been working great for the many years I've had it... but I want more space, and it's getting slow for what I want to do with it.

I stuck in the new hard drive (and made sure to adjust the jumpers accordingly on both drives), slaved to my old drive, and formatted it. I partitioned it, and then used xcopy to clone my old drive to my new drive (I'm using windows XP, by the way).

So that's fine and dandy. I could see the new hard drive in my computer, and I could access files and whatnot with it - but I had intentions of using it as the disk that I would boot up with, instead of my old drive.

So I switch the hard drives cables (now the end is going to the new drive, the master), and set the old drive to the slave. I load my BIOS and make sure to load the correct drive, and then I go to load xp like I normally do... but when it gets to the XP loading screen (with the blue loading bar), it'll stay there for about 10 seconds, and then the monitor will go black, and the computer will restart!

If I set the BIOS back to loading my old drive as the one that booted, it seems to work fine. But the moment I set it to boot my new drive, it gets unhappy.

Any thoughts? Your help is greatly appreciated!

 

Yeah, there is good free software to do this.

DriveImage XML (excellent) make image and restore to the new drive or drive to drive copy
http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm

SelfImage
http://selfimage.excelcia.org/

Now you owe Steve and I a Karate lesson! Better yet a high paying part in your next movie!

Mike

 

Okay, I used the software that came with the hard drive to copy the files. Still the same deal. Any other thoughts?

Hah, actually JC didn't initially practice karate - he specialized in acrobatics in some sort of theatre opera thing.

Edit: Okay I'm using DriveImage XML. I re-formatted the hard drive, and now I'm currently in the process of copying over my old --> new hard drive.

Something about it not being able to "lock down" the new drive?

Edit2: Alright, so I copied over my old drive to my new drive with DriveImage XML. Now when I try to boot with the new drive, it says "Error Loading OS." Interesting. As if it's not there!