Attempting to clone a IDE drive with XP Home to a SATA drive

 

 I have two computers:

1. A Dell Dimension 4400 with a 500G IDE drive containing XP Home and
a long list of installed programs that I want to clone.
2. A Dell Inspiron with Vista installed on a 288G SATA drive.  The
Inspiron has no IDE ports on the motherboard.

My objective is to clone the XP IDE drive to a new 1 TB SATA drive,
put it in the Inspiron and continue to run XP (in the Inspiron) with
all its installed applications intact.

Here's what I've done so far:

1. Obtained and successfully installed a StarTech controller card in
the Inspiron Vista computer, which contains 1 IDE and 2 SATA drive
ports.  

2. I installed the XP IDE drive to the StarTech IDE port.

3. I attached the new 1 TB drive to a SATA port (SATA-4) on the
Inspiron motherboard.

4. Using MaxBlast 5, I cloned the XP drive to the 1 TB SATA drive. Got
a message from MaxBlast that the cloning was successful.

5. If I log the 1 TB SATA drive (using Vista in the Inspiron) I see
all the files and folders that were copied from the IDE drive.  They
appear to be intact.

6. I removed the original 288G SATA drive form the Inspiron (which had
previously been booting and running Vista from the SATA-0 port on the
motherboard).

7. I replaced it with the 1 TB SATA drive with XP on it (connecting it
to SATA-0 port), expecting that it would boot to XP.  

Instead, I get a text message on a DOS screen that says that Windows
did not start successfully, and offers a number of options:  

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with networking
Safe Mode with command prompt

Last known Good Configuration
Start Windows Normally

Most of these options eventually restart the system and loop back to
this screen again.

I can choose "Safe Mode" and "Safe Mode with command prompt"

"Safe Mode with command prompt"  leaves me with a flashing cursor at a
DOS prompt.  I'm clueless about what to do with that.

 "Safe Mode" produces a DOS text screen containing a page or two of
things like this (which I assume to be missing XP drivers?)

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\NDIS.SYS

intelide.sys
ftdisk.sys
PartMgr.sys

Anyway, I'm hoping that someone in this group can give me a hand with
this, since I'm obviously doing *something* (or many things) wong.

Appreciate your help,

Walden

 

wrote:


I just put the StarTech board in the original Dell 4400 system,
connected the cloned 1TB SATA drive to it, removed the existing IDE XP
boot drive, then rebooted.  The XP copy on the SATA drive now boots
perfectly and makes everything on XP work as expected.

So ... the mystery remains: Why won't the very same 1 TB SATA drive
work as the boot drive when it's installed on the SATA-0 motherboard
port in the Inspiron?

 

Walden wrote:

What driver does the Inspiron use, to access its SATA port under WinXP ?
Is that driver in place ?  If anything was going to work, it would
involve

1) Install Startech in old computer.
2) Install driver for Startech card. Now the OS has a driver.
3) Clone to new disk.
4) Disconnect original drive, before booting Windows from the clone.
    Now you've tested that the old system boots from it, via the Startech.
    The original disk should be disconnected during the first clone boot.
5) Move clone disk and Startech card to new computer.
6) Now, since the driver for the Startech SATA port is in place,
    you know for sure there is a driver present for it.

As for the general topic of moving an install from one place to another,
there must be info out there already, as to what to expect. I build
my own computers for personal use, so this topic has never been an
issue for me. There is a suggestion here, that the OS could be BIOS
locked.

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000506.html

    Paul

 

wrote:


Try performing a Windows XP repair install.

 

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:55:02 -0400, Walden


It appears the drive clone was a success, but when you boot
XP it will stop because it is trying to find the Startech
drive controller and boot from that, instead of booting from
the drive connected to the Inspiron SATA controller.

Do a web search for terms like [move migrate XP existing
installation motherboard] which will detail the process to
add drive controller registry settings and driver files to
the cloned drive while still attached to the old system, to
give it the ability to boot from the integral SATA
controller in the new system.

If you want to avoid this labor you should be able to do as
Paul suggested, if you can get it to finish booting from the
Startech card and have installed it's driver on the old
system then by leaving the drive connected to the startech
card in the newer one it should be able to finish booting
unless there is another hardware change significant enough
to stop that process, but usually it's only a matter of
changing the drive controller so it can boot far enough to
plug-n-play any remaining differences.