Hard Drive Upgrade with Dual Boot XP/Vista

[akash1221]

Ok,

Here is my situation:

I have three hard drives installed on my computer:

C drive - 80 GB - XP installed
D drive - 120 GB - data drive
E drive - 80 GB - Vista installed

Dual boot works great. I recently purchased 3x 300GB hard drives and want to upgrade all drives.

I am planning on using Norton Ghost 12.0 (newest version). Question is, will Ghost work with the C drive and E drive cloning?

If not, are there other products that will support this?

Thanks,
Akash

[Computer Guru]

Hi akash, welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.

Norton Ghost should work just fine so long as you keep the drives in the same order.
That is to say, XP should be drive 0, Data is drive 1, and Vista is drive 2.

If you're in the market for a better program, I whole-heartedly recommend TrueImage - it's much more powerful and reliable compared to the competition (and especially compared to anything Norton )

[akash1221]

I tried both Ghost 12 and TrueImage 10...neither worked.

It completed cloning the drive, I rebooted, replacing the old drive with the new one. It brought up the Vista boot menu, I selected XP. Before I tried the cloning process, it would boot into Windows XP. However after cloning, the XP boot menu showed up and it showed Windows XP and Windows 2003. I selected Windows XP and then it said it couldnt find /ntldr.

I reverted back to my old drive and XP boots no problem...

I thought it was problem with the MBR so I went to an XP recovery console and did a fixmbr and fitxboot. I rebooted and the Vista menu did not show up but XP did boot just fine.

I then booted my computer usign the Vista CD (full version, Ultimate) and did a repair. It found a problem with the bootrec. And it applied the fix. I rebooted, the Vista menu showed up. I selected XP, the XP menu showed up, I selected XP and it gave me the same cannot find /ntldr error message...

Akash

[Computer Guru]

Probably need to change the drive letter for the XP entry in EasyBCD.