As you probably know I broke my laptop screen. Well I've gotten hold of a new one but it's backlight was dead. Do I've bastardized the two screens together to get a semi working one. It works but the backlight only really lights up a small strip at the bottom.

Anyway, I've also acquired a new hard drive. A 160GB WD Scorpio Blue to be exact. Now, what I want to do is somehow move my current XP installation over from its partition on the old drive onto a partition on the new drive. So, I did the sensible thing and started up partimage on my Ubuntu dual boot to copy the XP partition over. So far so good. Here comes the fun bit.

I can browse the new partition but it won't boot. I just get an "Error loading operating system" message at POST. So I popped in my completely legitimate XP installation CD and started up the recovery console. I used the "fixboot" command to re-install the boot loader. Except it didn't work. I got an error along the lines of "Non standard MBR. Fixboot cannot continue". So, I thought, run the "fixmbr" command. OK, fixed the MBR and then try fixboot again. Still no dice.

The only idea I have left is put a fresh install of Ubuntu onto a second partition I have ready on the new drive and hope that GRUB picks up the XP partition, negating the need for a proper XP bootloader (I think). Would this work? If not does anyone know how I'd go about putting a fresh and shiny new XP bootloader on the fresh and shiny new hard drive to bring my XP installation back to life? The installation is still on the old drive so I haven't actually lost anything... Yet...

(03/07/2010 05:17 PM)squee666 Wrote:  yeh did you format the HD and mark it as ACTIVE first

Erm... Maybe? I'd completely forgotten about that...

(04/07/2010 01:22 AM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  If all else fails, you can try installing another XP onto a separate partition.  This will install the correct bootloader etc.  Then change your boot.ini to boot from the correct drive, and wipe the temporary installation.

Clever. Very clever.