"Tim Haynes" <timhaynes@alumni.NO.SPAM.PLEASE.uwaterloo.ca> wrote in message
news:dnpgke$vjt$1@rumours.uwaterloo.ca...
> Okay, here's a weird one. I think the solution may be simple, but want
> to see what others think.
>
> A friend has a very old 6GB drive that I'm replacing with a new 80GB
> drive. The 6GB drive has been randomly failing. It will often boot
> into safe mode but then blue screen after a few minutes.
>
> The old 6GB drive previously had Win98 on it, and had been upgraded to
> WinXP Pro.
>
> I cloned the old HD onto the new HD, and tried booting the new HD.
>
> Strangely, it tries to boot into Win98 (even shows the Win98 boot
> graphic for about 2 seconds!) and then immediately dies horribly, asking
> where COMMAND.COM is.
>

There's something not clear here about how the old HD was configured, or the
new HD for that matter. I'm getting confused because it sounded initially
like he had Win98, then upgraded it to WinXP (iow, Win98 has been replaced
by XP, so Win98 is no more). But now it sounds like Win98 is still there!
So is this a case of the HD having Win98, BUT THEN, adding a new partition
for WinXP, iow, a multi-boot situation? If so, are they in their own
partitions?

Jim


> Now, the old drive never tried to boot into Win98. It always booted
> into WinXP.
>
> Why would the new (cloned) drive try to boot into Win98?
>
> Here is how I cloned it:
>
> 1. Old drive is the slave (D and the new drive is the master (C.
>
> 2. Used Partition Magic to copy the primary (and only) partition from
> the old drive to the new drive. It died about halway along because of
> too many errors (the old drive is failing, after all)
>
> 3. Used Partition Magic to define and format a FAT32 partition on the
> new drive. (The old drive had FAT32, and I knew I'd have to use DOS to
> copy the old drive's filesystem onto the new drive, crossing my fingers
> that only useless files would be unable to copy).
>
> 4. Used a WinME boot disk and FDISK to make the new drive's partition
> the primary active partition.
>
> 5. Used the same WinME boot disk and LCOPY.EXE to copy the filesystem
> from the old drive to the new drive. A few files failed, but I wasn't
> watching to see which ones.
>
> 4. Set the BIOS to boot the new master drive.
>
> 5. The new drive starts booting into Win98, then crashes, asking for
> COMMAND.COM.
>
> The boot.ini looks fine to me. It's identical between the old drive and
> the new drive, and the new drive attempts to boot WinXP just fine.
>
> I tried to start a Repair install of WinXP, but the WinXP setup CD
> doesn't give me the option. It seems to think that whatever is in
> C:\WINDOWS is useless and that it would be okay to completely overwrite
> it (losing all settings, users, user files, etc... which we definitely
> DON'T want to do!).
>
> Any ideas on what I can do to make the new drive boot into WinXP?
>
> Thanks
> Tim