Windows can start (partially) from USB drive but not from IDE slot

Hi,

I have a huge problem with my HDD. I attempted to clone my old 100GB HDD to a 320GB HDD using seagate discwizard. The cloning seems to be successful.

However, now I cant boot up from the 320GB HDD when it is in my SATA drive slot of my laptop. However, I can select "safe mode" and other options when I attempt to boot it from a USB external drive. However, I get the BSOD with a "Stop" signal right after the XP loading page comes up.

I suspect that the problem lies in the MBR but for other reasons, I have accidentently wiped my old HDD so I cant retreive the MBR from there. Any idea on how to rebuild the MBR? I have already tried using mbrboot and mbrfix from the recovery console but that didn't work.

 

Do you just have the single SATA port on the laptop?

 

Yes it's just a single IDE(0) master port

 

Have you tried a repair install?

 

there is no repair install option when I boot my computer using the windows xp cd

 

That reminds me of a problem we used to have, except that with some copies of one disc they worked, yet another copy of the same disc didn't... (don't ask me why though, and multiple copies incase we lost one/it broke/more than one PC needs fixing at once, which has happened). No idea how to sort that though...

 

Yes I tried that hours ago...

What is most peculiar is that it can at least get to to xp loading screen (but BSOD soon after that) but at least it could access the boot.ini (it gave me my options) and I could at least see the menu to select to boot into safe mode and so forth. However, when it is inside my computer, it is unable to even get to the boot.ini (Just a flashing _ on the screen)