[SOLVED] Cloning Western Digital OS

[shinnen]

Hi,
I have a Western Digital Cavier IDE hard drive (WD2500) with Windows XP installed on it. I have tried every cloning software that I can think of for cloning it's OS to another drive, and they never boot. I have tried other XP installations on other drives and they all clone well, but for some reason I can't seem to get the WD drive to play ball.
Does anyone know why this is so?
Thanks,
......... john

 

[Deleted member 14196]

full pc specs? maybe you are trying to boot uefi and that dinosaur is not capable of that. or the boot files might actually be on a different hdd

if thta old drive boots WITH NO OTHER DRIVES plugged in should tell you if the boot files are somewhere else

 

[fzabkar]

Are you cloning to other IDE drives? Which cloning tool are you using?

 

[shinnen]

Hi,
I cannot see anything referring to uefi or boot mode in msconfig or Aida32. The computer does have a Bios screen.
What specs would you like?
........ john

full pc specs? maybe you are trying to boot uefi and that dinosaur is not capable of that. or the boot files might actually be on a different hdd

if thta old drive boots WITH NO OTHER DRIVES plugged in should tell you if the boot files are somewhere else

 

[USAFRet]

Hi,
I have a Western Digital Cavier IDE hard drive (WD2500) with Windows XP installed on it. I have tried every cloning software that I can think of for cloning it's OS to another drive, and they never boot. I have tried other XP installations on other drives and they all clone well, but for some reason I can't seem to get the WD drive to play ball.
Does anyone know why this is so?
Thanks,
......... john

You're trying to boot into a different drive in this same system?
What is the target drive?

 

[USAFRet]

What cloning tools are you trying to use?

For something that old, CloneZilla might be the tool of choice.

Clonezilla - About

 

[fzabkar]

I'm wondering whether the OP is cloning an IDE drive to a SATA model, in which case the cloned file system would not have a SATA driver. Of course this could be rectified by selecting IDE compatibility mode for the SATA controller in BIOS. But the OP has ignored my questions ...

 

[shinnen]

Hi fzabkar,
Yes, other IDE drives. I've tried several cloners, but mostly Clonezilla and Lazesoft. They've usually worked in the past. Most often I get the NTOSKRNL.exe file is missing or corrupt, which isn't missing. When I replace it, it tells me that other files are missing, and when I replace them it eventually tells me something like it can't boot. It's always a dead end.
..... john

Are you cloning to other IDE drives? Which cloning tool are you using?

 

[fzabkar]

IIUC, you have a working XP system with a single 250GB IDE drive. You then clone this drive, sector by sector, to a second IDE drive using the same machine. Then you remove the source drive and replace it with the clone. Is that right?

BTW, does the cloning software run from a USB drive or CD/DVD?

You can compare two files at the command line as follows:

• FC /b file1 file2

That should find any differences between your original NTOSKRNL.exe file and the cloned copy.

Your boot.ini file should tell us how the XP OS is booting itself:

https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/bootini.htm

 

[shinnen]

Hi again,
Yes, you're exactly right. That is what I'm doing. And, I'm running the clone softwares from CDs. The cloned disk does not show in windows, so I'll find out, after I post this, what its boot.ini file says.
My current boot. ini file says .....
[Boot Loader]
Timeout=6
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows
[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows="Windows XP (or alike) [d:0,p:1]" /fastdetect
Could you be more specific wrt how FC /b file1 file2 instruction is written. I assume "file" means the file name. What does "FC/b" stand for? (Is there a space after "FC"?)
...... john

 

[fzabkar]

FC = File Compare

It's a DOS command that is included in Windows. It is executed from the command line.

https://www.computerhope.com/fchlp.htm

 

[shinnen]

Hi,
Well, I have solved the problem, for now. I'm not sure what I did, but I'm now able to clone the WD partition using the utility on the Lazesoft recovery CD.
Briefly, when I tried using Clonezilla, it told me that the WD partition had continuity problem(s) and that I should scan and fix it, which I did. Then it told me that the target drive was too small (by 100mbs), so I reduced the size of the WD partition. After that the cloning went well, but the target would not boot past the Windows' loading graphic. After that I tried running Windows ASR on the clone, in an attempt to repair the boot configuration. No dice, it didn't help. So then I took, what I thought was a long shot, and ran Lazesoft, et voila, the target now boots and works fine. However, I'm not really sure which, if any, of the changes I made fixed the problem, since I had tried most of the same remedies before.
Thank you again for all your help. I appreciate it.
....... john