Moving up and slowing down.
 

Alright. So, I thought I had some idea what I was doing. I hooked up my new 80gig 7200 rpm samsung drive and partioned it, then I used norton ghost to copy my old data from my previous hard drive to the new hard drive. That all seemed to go fine, so I switched my old HD to slave and my new HD to master and switched the EIDE cable positions and rebooted, my old hard drive still came up as C and my new as D drive then, when I remove my old hard drive completely, my computer boots, recognizes the new HD as C and then loads XP until I can see a mouse cursor and a blue windowsXP logo but my start menu/desktop dosn't load. I get the same thing in safe mode, Where have I gone wrong? I appreciate the help as always.

That sounds like a genuine shit-sandwich to me. I've never been able to get any ghosting programs to work myself. Do you have a full-version of Windows laying around? I'd copy what you need onto the Samsung, then format and reinstall Windows on it.

-Lasereth

yeah, I can. I was just hoping to have everything done in one nice and easy step. I read that booting with the origonal drive in even as slave, windows XP will set it to C and modify settings on the other drive to account for it not working,. Im going to try once more and go the XP install route probaly.

i think it might have something to do with the MBR master boot record? i think. not sure, but i vaguely recall reading somewhere that information is written there for boot-up.

Just use the Samsung boot/ installation disk. yes, sometimes doing what the directions say is correct. After partitioning the drive from the samsung install disk, choose the copy drive option, and everything, including the encrypted boot records will copy.

Then throw away ghost and realize that DOS is still better for some things. not meaning to be mean/ sarcastic here, but I saw a lot of people buy hard drives and not using the install disks when i worked IT phone support.

A great DOS based utility is availible here from samsung that will set up and copy everything for you. Just download and run. when prompted, insert a disk and then boot to that disk after the program finishes.

Sorry if i sound a little assholish, and good luck.

No software disk came with my hard-drive. I will try the program.

the program dosn't have the ability to copy a hard drive contents, only to format and partion it.

Try this....
 

maxtor MaxBlast dos partition utility. May kag on the drive not being maxtor, but I've used earlier versions to partition everything from seagate to WD,
Also try Seagates DiskWizard , as that may work.
Or try Data lifeguard from western digital.

If you need me to get all technical, the reason the install didn't work is because the copy protections built into Windows will not allow Ghost to access the boot or parts of the system partitions. by booting to dos, you are overriding Windows because DOS will always have full system access whenb booted to, no matter what the OS. That's why all manufactures make an install utility utilizing DOS, it's the only way to have full partition access.

You could also boot to DOS with your old drive as master and use the FDISK and copy partition commands, but that can get complex on drives over 32gb.

I used maxblast last night, slow, but it worked. Thanks.