Resolved Swapping C drive for G drive

I think I might have just figured out the problem. Your hard drives, do they have the same connectors or is one on the ribbon cable and the other plugs direct to the MOBO. If so then a SATA driver will be needed. Let me know and I'll find the solution.

 

Hi Mark, you've been busy.
Have not had time to read and digest your previous last nights posts. Do I work my way through them still ?
In the orig configuration. both drives are connected to MB by the same wide grey ribbon cable (Ultra 40 pin ATA) with 320 on the black end wide plug, and the 750 on the grey wide plug "half" way along. Jumpers on 320 set to cable select and on 750 has no jumpers. That works perfectly with both drives being recognised.
After cloning etc, I remove power and plug from 320 and 750 and plug the black end wide plug into the 750 along with power. I have tried no jumper (comes up on the first Asus screen as Primary drive fails) and if I set jumper to cable select that screen comes up as Primary Drive fails
Slave drive fails. ( with one drive only connected !)

In BIOS with no jumper the drive is recognised, but now I'm confused with setting it to LBA or LARGE or what. Fairly sure it is set to boot from the only drive in the PC but that should be automatic shouldn't it.
At the moment in windows disc management it shows
Disk0 is Drive_C (C) 298.09 GB NTFS Healthy (system)
Disk1 is Drive_c (F) 298.09 GB NTFS Healthy (active)
and I have 400.55 GB Unallocated
So Cloning has given me a cloned partition identical in size to 320 with the rest of disk unallocated, if that helps.
I think the 750 is getting grooves in it from all this cloning.
I do appreciate your help Mark
My head is swimming.
I got Boot recovery from here if your interested
http://forums.pcpitstop.com/index.php?/topic/150212-boot-to-recovery-console-wo-xp-cd/
Should I try the jumper as Master instead of cable select http://www.hddoctor.net/jumper-settings-for-seagate-and-maxtor-ata-hard-drives/

Regards
DD

 

OK, so both drives are IDE, if the cloned drive had been SATA a quick insertion of a driver could have resolved the problem but not to worry I learned something from finding that out. Windows XP does not have built in drivers for SATA.

Basically the set up on the ribbon cable is master on the end and slave on the half way point. Jumpers should be set as master and slave correspondingly. It seems to work with different configurations but I suspect it slows down the access to the drives. IDE is being replaced with SATA which has no jumpers to mess with and each drive has its own cable direct to the MOBO, this is what I have. Some new boards no longer have IDE connections, CD/DVD drives are also changing to SATA.

I have not managed to get much info on LBA and LARGE settings but I think this was more for much older MOBO's to allow them to function with hard drives above a certain size. Your system has functioned OK with the bigger drive so this setting can be ignored.

The boot order is automatic to a certain extent. It searches for a boot record in the order that the devices are listed until it finds one. Boot order is normally set to floppy first primary master hard drive then slave and secondary master CD/DVD drive and then slave.

What you are seeing in disk management shows the system drive that you cloned from and the active drive which is the clone. As I said earlier the problem is most probably the MBR on the clone. My brain is getting a good work out on this one but will stay with this until an answer is found. Thanks for the link to the recovery console, I shall save that for future use.

What I think you should try now is my solution with the win98 floppy in post39. You should not need to burn the clone again. Lets see if we can focus on getting it to boot. So there is no doubt, set the jumpers accordingly to master or slave depending on what configuration you have the drive/s set up in. So, when you are testing the clone on its own, plug it into the end of the ribbon cable and set the jumper as master.

Amazing, how what should be a straight forward operation, can become such a headache. Doing this with SATA is so much easier but I am close to betting that the MBR fix will see your clone booting (I hope).

 

Thanks Mark,
Will try that this afternoon.
Bit confused with the win 98 floppy though. Not XP?
Regards
DD

 

Confusing, it certainly is. The reason is that the win98 boot disk has the files on it which should sort out the boot sector, on later version that would not be the case. A win98 boot disc should be in every computer repairers toolkit

The more I have searched for an answer to this problem the more I have seen this solution, I am soooooo praying it will work.

 

In the orig configuration. both drives are connected to MB by the same wide grey ribbon cable (Ultra 40 pin ATA)

If that is correct, then my first move move would be to change that that to 80 pin, 40 pin will not even allow you to use cable select.
hawk22

 

You have 2 different problems. Correcting the first will let XP correct the second on it own, if there is only the cloned hdd in system.

You will need to reset the bios, there may be a jumper on motherboard or you will need to remove the battery (30 min or so]. Be sure to remove the power cord from the wall. Be sure to take care , static electricity can kill the motherboard. When you reset the bios all setting will go back to default so if there are special setting you made, you will have to redo them, you will need to set time/date.

The 2nd problem is XP's registry under ???/Mounted Devices keeps track of all hdds 'hdd id in the MBR' and partitions in system . 98's 'fdisk mbr' command will remove the hdd's ID, no problem doing that. One entire tells XP where to look for the system files -- the old hdd. It will correct its self if there are no other FAT or NTFS partitions, there is only one place to look.

 

Sorry it probably is a 40 pin 80 cable

 

Just to clear up some of the other suggestions.

For your information. An 80 wire ribbon cable has 40 wires connected between the MOBO and the hard drives and 40 extra wires in between the 40 data wires that are all connected to ground to reduce interference between the wires. There is not usually a problem with the standard 40 wire ribbon cable unless used on high speed ATA controllers (not sure what is classified as high speed). As far as I have been able to establish if the cable has three different coloured connectors it is an 80 wire cable. The older type had connectors all the same colour and a red stripe down one side to identify which way round it should be connected as it was possible to connect this older style cable back to front. The PC we are concerned with here has not shown any other problems so either it has an 80 wire cable or it functions perfectly well with a 40 wire.

Setting the drive jumpers to master and slave relative to their position on the cable (not using cable select) should avoid any problems with data transfer.

I have learned while trying to resolve this cloning issue that editing the registry to clear the drive letters is a known workaround for this problem. To make it work it has to be performed on the drive to be copied before it is cloned. It could possibly be done after cloning but that would be a little more difficult. The method using the win98 floppy to fix the MBR after cloning is far simpler and there is no risk of messing up the registry. If it fails I have instruction ready for the registry editing.

Resetting the bios should not be necessary and if it was it could be done from within the bios by selecting "reset to default ", no need to take the battery out. I have given a guide for the boot order and that is all that has been changed. There were no prior issues relating to bios settings that I am aware of.

A drive has been successfully cloned and it just needs to have the MBR fixed to make it boot.

Hopefully the fix with the win98 floppy will do the trick. Running a "Repair" install with a windows xp disc would be another alternative.

 

Thanks Mark for the above,
I intend to have a go later this morning, a days break has done wonders,
Regards
DD

 

Sorry looks like I jumped the Gun a bit, the cable that you have, corresponding to the Link is absolutely correct.

hawk22

 

OK Mark. No go, just the same. Will give you a blow by blow account of what I did and what I saw.
320 disconnected and 750 connected as usual.
boot to BIOS, Prim master says :-
User type HDD
LBA
Cyl 1024
Head 255
Sector 63
CHS Cap 8422
Max LBA Cap 750158
BOOT section says 1) IDE hard drive ST3750640A (thats the 750)
2) NEC DVD RW
3)Rom legacy
4)INt18 Dev(network)
Save and Exit bios
floppy in and boot up.
It does its bus search etc
Then a note comes up saying "Win 98 has detected that drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT 32 partition "
Aprompt type fdisk /mbr and enter
remove floppy and reboot
Asus boot page says :-
Primary master disk fails
Primary slave disk fails (it always says both fail when a jumper is in place & only Primary master disk fails with no jumpers.
??
will send a pm if I can

 

Not trying to interfere here, but I read in your earlier Post:

At the moment in windows disc management it shows
Disk0 is Drive_C (C) 298.09 GB NTFS Healthy (system)
Disk1 is Drive_c (F) 298.09 GB NTFS Healthy (active)

File system being NTFS

In your latest Post:

Then a note comes up saying "Win 98 has detected that drive C does not contain a valid FAT or FAT 32 partition "

Win 98 will not find a FAT partition if it is NTFS.

Sorry but I am a little confused here, but I am sure you will sort it out eventually.

hawk22

 

Thanks for the interest Hawke, I'm just trying to post anything that might be relavant to make the diagnosis easier. Too much info must be better than too little. Thanks again though,
DD

 

Hawk22,
Windows XP is in the NTFS file format but it's boot sector is in FAT32.
______________________________________________________________

David,
This error, no valid fat32 partition found, indicates that the cloned drive has not got the boot sector on it Is there any chance you can get hold of a windows xp disc so you can run a "Repair" install.

 

David,
Did you ever go back a step and try the fixmbr command suggested in post 36. Instructions were in post 12, just substitute the commands.

 

Don't think so mark.
I thought spotmau cloned everything over.
When I cloned my wifes laptop to a larger Hd drive (Vista) and just swapped over drives (with Acronis Migrate easy7.0) it just booted up no problem.
Its a mystery to me why this won't work here, What is stopping the OS being cloned. (rhetorical question)
DD

 

Yup, so did I. The problem seems to stem from the XP boot sector being in a different format, in Vista it is the same.

When you did the clone did you try to reboot before you disconnected the drive you had copied from, that would have caused windows to alter the MBR on the cloned drive as it would have reacted to seeing two drives with the same drive letter.

Try the fixmbr command and see what happens, at this stage you have nothing to loose.

 

Mark,
Didn't try and reboot, but spotmau doesn't shut down like Acronis does when cloning complete.
Should I clone again (with spotmau or Acronis as they both seem to do the same) just in case, (the programme doesn't shut down the pc) shut down and disconnect 320, connect 750 as primary ,jumpered to Master or not ?, just clarify how I do the fixmbr, and what I should see. I presume the worst that can happen is that the 750 drive loses its information, as the 320 is disconnected and safe.
DD

 

Mark ?
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=418&page=3