Copied drive to drive won't boot up

[Anwar]

I'm having Acer laptop on which i had installed Windows Xp as my operating system. I bought a Maxtor 200 GB Sata hard disk on which i want to copy my current C drive. I then copied drive to drive and all seemed well. I switched the drives (which are both set on cable select) but the Maxtor would not boot up. It stayed at the Acer laptop screen. I could not even go into setup. This has happened several times. So can any body tell me that after copying from drive to drive why won't it boot up? Does any body knows about this issue? Kindly provide me the correct solution to resolve the above issue.

[Calvin K]

When Windows boots up on the new drive, it sees the serial number of the new drive and assumes the partition that's on it now belongs on the previously selected drive letter, which almost always is not C drive. According to me you need to put the OS disc in your CD drive. Then try to press any key to boot CD on prompt. Go to the Recovery Console by typing "R" at the setup screen. This will not wipe your drive. When it asks for a password it is generally blank so just hit enter. Type "chkdsk C:/r" without the quotes. The /r tells the chkdsk to "repair" and "recover". Hit enter and wait till it is funnished. It may take a very long time.

[Lillebror]

Since the Windows installation boots from C drive, there is now no C drive when Windows boots up. You need to make sure the boot is to the ide 0 and no boot to ide 1, in fact disable all other boots. Then it should have nothing to do with the old drive as it shouldn't try to boot to it and you should be able to boot up normally and copy data.

[jesse]

Attempting to log on makes Windows try to load the user's registry from C:\Documents and Settings\<username>, and the C: drive isn't there, so Windows just aborts the logon attempt and logs back off. I suspect you will now need to use the Recovery Console to run the fixboot command on the new drive. That's why I asked if you had the install CD since you'll need to boot to that and get the "R" selection for the Recovery Console. The fixboot command can be directed to the proper drive partition so be sure to point it to the new one. Run fixboot /? is you need to see how it's done. If you use the imaging method, it gets everything including the boot sector code and MBR. Cloning, depending on the software, will only get the data on the disk.