[Turambar]

I decided to get an upgrade for my laptop's hard drive, since my birthday is coming up. I started now, figuring that I'd have problems and that my birthday would actually be a better estimate as to when i would actually be able to enjoy my new drive. So, i got an adapter, and i backed up all my data onto the desktop's hard drive (this computer) and then restored that backup to the new hard drive.

upon inserting the new hard drive with the old data, my laptop tells me that there is no OS.

there are, however, some possible issues. Right now, the hard drive has the name D: (I reattached it to the desktop to see what was wrong. I'm not certain if that would cause the problem, but it's possible. However, for obvious reasons, the name C: is taken on my computer. Is there a way to switch the name, remove the drive, and switch it back?

also, if I have done something incredibly stupid, and my problem is something completely different, please let me know.

I'm using windows XP

[IceFire]

Mmmm...I just woke up from a nap (getting old you know) so I'm a bit fuzzy but if you just copied the whole of the contents of the drive using something like Windows Explorer then its missing the bits on the drive that actually say "this is a bootable Windows drive".  There's terms and all sorts of things like that but its not coming to mind right now...not sure how you'd fix that.

[vyper]

Forget your entire process. Get software like Norton Ghost, image the entire drive, then write that image to the new drive.

[achtung]

Remove the old drive.  Insert the new one.  Install windows from scratch.

[Turambar]

Forget your entire process. Get software like Norton Ghost, image the entire drive, then write that image to the new drive.

i did that.

[Turey]

To me, it sounds like your MBR wasn't written right. You'll need to get it written again.

[karajorma]

Run the windows CD. Boot into the recovery console and type fixmbr then fixboot. IIRC that should do it.

[Turambar]

i cant find my laptop's disc

i'm pursuing several options currently

i got it to boot, but windows bluescreens with some 0x0000007 error (which it says is caused by equipment malfunction which i find highly unlikely).  i can boot in safe mode as well.  once i find my XP cd i will attempt a repair of windows.  currently i am doing a disk check of my old HD, as it had one bad sector that wouldnt copy, and i guess that one sector is whats causing me to bluescreen

hopefully, that's what is causing my problem, but if it is not, i'm still scouring my house for my windows discs.

[Turambar]

**** it.


too many bluescreens, gonna do a clean install.

it'll help me modding to do a clean install of FS2 as well.

[Herra Tohtori]

Might be interesting to try and install a secondary OS (read: Linux distro of choice) with GRUB on the same HD - it would likely find the Windows installation and make the drive bootable...

That is, if you didn't perform a clean sweep already.

[Polpolion]

It might be a problem with BIOS. BIOS has a seperate naming system from windows and probably got confused as to what hard drive is what.
You just copy and pasted the files while leaving the original HD blank, right? Well when the computer starts up BIOS decides which drive to boot off of with the information you put into it in the setup screen, and that hasn't changed because all you did was move stuff. It still thinks that nothing has changed and you still want to boot from the original HD. And IIRC renaming the HD in windows wouldn't work because yeah, BIOS has a separate way of naming.

Maybe.


If that is the case:
Format all the laptop HD's your using, reinstall windows on the preferred HD, and move over just the non-installed (ie things that don't change registry), and reinstall everything else. Then move over all the stuff like saved whatever you're working ons or mods, etc.

[jr2]

Hang on, probably the problem is the frikking OEM restore partition... if you have one of those, it can really screw things up if you're not aware of it's existence, and you do something like this... This partition isn't viewable by standard means, unless the software you're using knows how to access teh partition... this partition contains your recovery CDs / DVDs, should you choose to restore or burn them...

Does your BIOS display a "press XX key to start recovery" line or similar?  If so, see if you can get that working, if you can, restore everything, burn those CDs (this option will either be in the recovery system, or perhaps under the manufacturers name in the Windows Start Menu), then use the built in option in the recovery software to remove the partition... then you will have a normally partitioned hard disk again.  Then you can do whatever you're going to do with it.