Beaware XP disk backup trap

January 15th, 2006

tried to upgrade one xp box to use a bigger hard drive today. I did the same thing several times before, don’t remember any problems, but it failed on me today when I tried to do on Jane’s computer. After the disk clone, the XP on new hard drive rebooted fine, but once logged in, it automatically logged out, then prompt me to log in again.

Did some research, it seems the problem resides in the way I made the clone, when both hard drive were present in XP, OS marked the main drive vs 2nd drive in HD’s MBR, so when just the 2nd drive (new bigger drive) was used, XP would still think it is 2nd drive, to fix this, just use this command when you have win98 boot disk with a fdisk.exe program

fdisk.exe /mbr

then it worked magically, wow, it took 3 hours and 20 computer reboots for me to figure this out!!

Entry Filed under: General