[ZylonBane]

Okay, so I just upgraded from my creaky old hard drive to a new, much more roomy one. I've used Partition Magic to clone the boot partition over to the new drive... but when I unplug the old drive, jumper the new one to primary, and reboot... nuthin'. The system can't see any bootable devices.

Frak.

I'm probably missing something very simple here.

[Fury]

Let me guess. You bought a SATA2 drive and your motherboard does not support SATA2. In this case, move a jumper on the HDD into SATA1 compatibility mode as instructed on top of the HDD.

Edit: Wait a sec, the drive was identified while you were messing with partition magic? Eh, then don't mess with partition magic. I guess you're a Windows user, so then boot from Windows CD and recreate partitions, reformat and reinstall. Plug in the old HDD and copy files over. Much simpler and safer that way.

[Freyr]

When you cloned the drive across, did it make whichever drive you have windows on an active partition?

[IPAndrews]

Oh when it does eventually see the HD, don't be surprised when your windows partition won't boot because your old drive wasn't SATA and you new one is.

[ZylonBane]

When you cloned the drive across, did it make whichever drive you have windows on an active partition?

Yes. I can even browse it from Windows when it's in slave mode.

No, it's not a SATA drive. This is an old Abit NF7 motherboard-- no native SATA support. So I've duped an NTFS partition from one PATA drive to another.

Of course I could reformat the partition and reinstall everything from scratch, but the whole point of this exercise is to avoid doing that.

My best guess at this point is that some boot code is missing from the drive.

[Descenterace]

Ah... yeah, that'll probably be it.

The BIOS can see it, yes? If not, the problem is not missing boot code.

Assuming the BIOS recognises it just fine, I'm guessing the disk simply doesn't have an appropriate Master Boot Record on it. Take out your other hard disk and set up the new one as Primary Master, yadda yadda yadda. Dig out your Windows CD and get to the Recovery Console. Log in and use 'FIXMBR'. Say 'yes' to anything it asks; you have a backup of the disk so it isn't going to do anything irreversible.
Now use 'BOOTCFG /REBUILD'.

(I'm not 100% sure about this syntax (I haven't used the RC in a while) so try 'HELP BOOTCFG' first. The option will be something like /REBUILD or /RESCAN).

It should detect your boot partition and set up the Windows boot manager correctly. Reboot when it's done and everything should be fine.

Note that 'should' is the operative word. I have hit so many problems with the Windows boot manager that's just not funny any more. If it still doesn't work you might try 'FIXBOOT C:' at the Recovery Console, although the boot sector should've been copied as part of the partition.
If you can't even log into the Recovery Console, I'd suggest blanking the partition (keep it the same size as the one on your original hard disk), installing Windows, then recopying the partition over from the original disk. Then resize and whatever.

[WMCoolmon]

Besides what Descenterace said, you could also try the "Cable Select" setting on the drive. That's sometimes worked for me where the other options didn't.

[Bobboau]

have you tried kicking it yet?
my computer works better when I kick it.

[ZylonBane]

Okay, turns out the problem was in fact a missing (and then after I tried something else, corrupted) master boot record. The fix turned out to be laughably simple-- boot off a Win98 boot floppy, then type "fdisk /mbr". It's an undocumented function of fdisk that rewrites the MBR on the current master drive.

Yay!

[kode]

not too much of an undocumented feature, tbh.

and you could have fixed it quite easily by booting an xp disc and using the command 'fixmbr' in the recovery console...

[ZylonBane]

"Undocumented" in the sense that the program doesn't admit to having that feature (/? doesn't list it).

I'm actually still running Win2K. So far I've had no reason to switch to XP... they both run pretty much all the same software.

[ZmaN]

no tahts not true...

the problem with 2k is that it becomes limited when you put decent ahrdware into it.  its probably running fine becasue your motherboard is so old.  Putting windows 2k on a computer like mine (see sig) is a complete waste becasue windows becomes hardware limited and it works as if it cant take advantage of all the power in the PC....

For you its fine.

[ZylonBane]

See ZmaN, the issue here is that you're a semiliterate moron, and you never have the slightest clue about anything you talk about.

You may as well not bother, really.

[BlackDove]

Burn.

That was however, very moronic of you in turn.

[Herra Tohtori]

WTF is it with people in internet behaving as they would like to behave in RealLife(TM) and not as they would behave in real life?

[BlackDove]

Well that question was answered in the masterful depiction of the rules of the internet.



That's not the issue here however.

[ZylonBane]

Burn.

That was however, very moronic of you in turn.

Oh come now, I thought it was rather eloquent. Well, as eloquent as I could be, considering who I was talking to.

Besides, there's no such thing as heaping too much abuse on people who have their system specs in their signature. Such folk are the self-appointed punching bags of the net.

I do have to wonder if ZmaN isn't just trolling though. His sig seems almost TOO perfectly stupid. As if it were carefully assembled from the dissected remains of lesser stupid sigs, to create a Frankenstein's Monster-esque mega-stupid-sig.

[BlackDove]

Don't get me wrong, I fully agreed with your assesment for the same reasons.

But the rules of the game change when it's your thread. The approach was... lacking... finesse if you will.

[ZylonBane]

Eh, the thread has served its purpose, so now I'm going to paint flames on it, kick it full of nitrous, and drive it into a brick wall.

[BlackDove]

Well I guess that's one way to go. After all, brick walls are fun.