Tech help--New hard drive

[PetiteFlower]

So I've filled the 30+120 gigs that I have, and I went out to Best Buy and got a new 160 gig to replace the 30 (primary). I also got Norton Ghost, since that seems to be the program to use for copying a drive. I used the drive copy feature, put the new drive in the primary slot and the old one as secondary, switched the jumper settings, restarted my computer....and got a big fat error! I don't remember exactly but something about hard drive not being configured correctly, windows can not read boot drive. I have tried it with the jumper settings on both master/slave and cable select, same error both times. I also tried booting with JUST the new drive connected, that time I couldn't even get it to load past the Dell splash screen to give me the error message.

I can't find anything on Norton's web site or the hard drive manufacturer's site to help me, so I figured I'd turn to Geek Central here before I break down and take the damn thing back to the store. I find myself wondering if I would have this problem if I'd spent the extra bucks for a Western Digital instead of getting the Hitachi with the $60 rebate.

[dlangton]

Does your motherboard support drives > 127MB?

What OS are you using, and what service pack level? Forget a 160MB hard drive if you're using Windows 9x. If you're using win2k, make sure you have at least SP3, and you've enabled the EnableBigLBA doubleword at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters.

The easiest method to solve the problem would be to get an IDE controller card that supports large hard drives.

[PetiteFlower]

I thought it was 137? Anyway I'm pretty sure it does, I'm running XP SP2. Windows recognizes the drive at its full size when its installed as a slave, it just won't boot from it.

[dlangton]

I'll assume that your BIOS has proper support for the hard drive - it sound like it does, but it's always a good idea to check for a BIOS update.

The last time I used Norton ghost to clone a WinXP hard drive, I wound up with a primary drive recognized as D:, rather than C: I solved the problem by using the Ghost software from a DOS disk. I fdisk'ed the drive using a Win98 boot floppy, than I booted from a Ghost boot disk and cloned the drive. I always run chkdsk afterwards, since the system information for the hard drive will be wrong. Works fine that way.

[PetiteFlower]

What do you mean, the system information for the hard drive will be wrong?

[dlangton]

Information such as the type of hard drive and the amount of free space are different when you change the hard drive. Chkdsk will correct that problem.

A few weeks ago I cloned a new hard drive under Windows 2k using the included Maxtor software. Things were mostly ok, except that my AV and firewall software didn't work. I wound up using the Ghost boot disks. It's also important to not use the Win2k or WinXP disk partition utilities when creating a partition, or you'll wind up with the wrong drive letter. No need to format, just partition. Things get rather hairy when you no longer have a C: drive.