Copied old hard drive to new drive in XP, now PC will not boot

[bjhorrell]

I had a 30GB drive with three partions. I copied each partition to a new 80GB drive, with norton gohst 2002.

All the files are on the new drive, I removed the old one as the primary and replaced it with the new one.

Now when I try to boot it say "PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT".

I have the student version of windows XP pro, so I never had to activate it.

Any ideas on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks in advance,
Ben

 

[wjsulliv]

First, I have a question, then a possible solution

Question:
When you say student version of XP Pro, do you mean academic, as in you got it from one of the VS .NET launches? I ask becasue I am planning to attend one of those, and wonder about this activation thing. So academic doesn't require activation? Does it require a product key like 95/98/Me? If so do you think I could put it on multiple machines?


Possible solution:
First make sure in the bios that the new hard drive has the primary partion set to active. Then, Pop in your XP disk and set up your machine to boot from CD-Rom. Then use the fixmbr commands to restore the boot record. You can search here and on microsofts website for information about how fixmbr works. But essentailly, as long as all your copy went fine, fixmbr will correct a corrupted Master Boot Record, in the event that it doesn't boot.

This is not guarenteed to work. You may want to back up your partitions again or recopy them first, before messing with them if you don't have a back-up.

 

[bjhorrell]

Yes it is an academic version, it was from the book store at my school(Purdue).
It had no key or activation.

Thanks for the info, i will try it out tomorrow morning.

Ben