Odd result after cloning Windows XP disk

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John Gray
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Odd result after cloning Windows XP disk

Post by John Gray »

Using Macrium Reflect I cloned the Windows XP disk in a Dell PC to a new, larger, disk in a USB caddy, then interchanged them.

When booting from the new disk, all works ok up until I get what may well be called the Windows XP Splash Screen.

1) the Dell BIOS screen displays and terminates normally
2) the Windows startup screen with the three blue blobs moving from left to right displays, and terminates normally
3) the black screen with the cursor visible displays, then terminates almost immediately, as normal
4) then is displayed the screen with the dark blue horizontal bars top and bottom, with the remainder of the screen light blue, apart from the (smaller) Microsoft Windows XP and the four coloured flying windows just offset to the right from the centre of the screen display, but stays there 'forever'. The mouse cursor can be moved, but the keyboard appears dead (Ctrl-Alt-Del is inoperative). Only the power-off button works.

I've tried a whole bunch of things like Last Known Good (not that there was one!), Safe Mode - ordinary and With Networking give the same result as above. Safe Mode with Command Prompt would enable me to type Stuff in. I've also booted from an XP CD and tried the Recovery Console and used a few commands such as FixBoot (although the PC hangs a long way from boot time).

I've even taken out the new memory which I'd added several days ago, and which worked OK with the previous hard disk, to no effect.

Does anyone have any Bright Ideas about what can be done now? And can anyone confirm that the screen described in point 4 above is "the Windows XP Splash Screen", or identify it appropriately! Thanks
John Gray

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Bigaldoc
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Re: Odd result after cloning Windows XP disk

Post by Bigaldoc »

Lots of differences in our circumstances, John, not the least of which is Shadow Protect rather than Macrium, and mine is a multi-boot system.

BUT, just in case anything catches your eye, you might find time to read through these two threads from last summer when I replaced my hard drive with a larger one. You too may be having BOOT.INI troubles. I had a lot of trouble:

Shadow Protect Restore From CD

Shadow Protect Recommendation

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John Gray
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Re: Odd result after cloning Windows XP disk

Post by John Gray »

Thanks, Al. I'll read through the posts again.

However, my problem seems to be occurring so far after boot time that the only thing I can think of is missing drivers for this 2 TB disk. But these should have been loaded into the original Windows XP when the USB caddy containing the 'new' drive was first connected...

And on the bus home I wondered whether it might be an example of the Advanced Format disk first-sector alignment problem with XP.
John Gray

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John Gray
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Re: Odd result after cloning Windows XP disk

Post by John Gray »

For the benefit of anyone who might encounter this problem with an Advanced Format Disk and Windows XP, the solution was to use GParted to move the start of the XP partition from sector 63 to sector 2048 (which is a multiple of 8 x 512 byte sectors) and equivalent to 1 MiB.

This operation is not trivial, and requires the partition to be shrunk by enough to cause the operation to work, then a dummy 1 MiB or 2 MiB partition inserted in front of it, and everything moved up very slightly with the partition size increased to (just less than) the original size. Total time for the 100 MiB partition was well over half an hour.

If I hadn't already had XP installed (by cloning it from the original disk),
it would have been much easier to reformat the partition with Windows 7 (or Vista) to get the start sector of the partition to be OK for use by XP, which would then be installed from scratch.
John Gray

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Bigaldoc
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Re: Odd result after cloning Windows XP disk

Post by Bigaldoc »

Was all of this caused by the 2 TB size of the drive, John? If not, it has to make one wonder about the benefit of using backup images to move to larger size drives.

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John Gray
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Re: Odd result after cloning Windows XP disk

Post by John Gray »

Not as far as I am aware. 2.2 TB is about the maximum before problems may be experienced. That's why I didn't buy a 3 TB drive!
John Gray

Venison is quiet deer, and quite dear.