I recently cloned my 30GB Thinkpad hard drive to a 120GB drive using XXCLONE. Once I installed the new drive as my system drive, I encountered what seems to be a fairly common problem: the C: partition won't boot on its own. When I power on my computer, it goes through the POST normally, and then goes to a blank screen with a flashing cursor. There is no HDD activity. I can boot from a floppy that has a copy of boot.ini pointing to multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS (a copy from C:\, so the problem is not with boot.ini). If I boot from the floppy, it displays the flashing cursor for several seconds while reading the floppy, then the WinXP splash screen comes up and loads normally. If I boot from the floppy everything works great, and I have absolutely no problems until I need to restart the system. From the XXCLONE instructions, it sounds like I should only have to use the floppy once, and then the HD should be self-bootable.
I initially thought that my boot sector or MBR were to blame. I've tried using XXCLONE to initialize the boot sector and the MBR to no avail. I ran fixmbr and fixboot from the recovery console, but it didn't change anything. I tried copying a new NTLDR and ntdetect.com, running chkdsk /r, and also bootcfg /rebuild but nothing has changed.
Someone suggested that the absence of the IBM Recovery Partition could be causing it not to boot, and I should image my old disk to preserve that partition. The thing is, I don't want that 5GB waste of space on my new drive. Does anyone know how that affects the bootability and how I could correct it?
I am running XP SP3 on the C: partition, and would eventually like to install Ubuntu on a second partition, but I want to get the boot issue straightened out first (or would installing a second OS repair the bootability?). What is the best course of action here?
I initially thought that my boot sector or MBR were to blame. I've tried using XXCLONE to initialize the boot sector and the MBR to no avail. I ran fixmbr and fixboot from the recovery console, but it didn't change anything. I tried copying a new NTLDR and ntdetect.com, running chkdsk /r, and also bootcfg /rebuild but nothing has changed.
Someone suggested that the absence of the IBM Recovery Partition could be causing it not to boot, and I should image my old disk to preserve that partition. The thing is, I don't want that 5GB waste of space on my new drive. Does anyone know how that affects the bootability and how I could correct it?
I am running XP SP3 on the C: partition, and would eventually like to install Ubuntu on a second partition, but I want to get the boot issue straightened out first (or would installing a second OS repair the bootability?). What is the best course of action here?
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