Replacing an old hard drive causes the system had become unbootable

OK, here's the scenario.

Background:
My old computer with Windows XP has been installed on a hard disk of 40 GB. Later through subsequent updates, I bought the upgrade Windows Vista Professional (retail) and proceeded to install Vista on a brand new 250 GB hard drive. Initially, he had some problems I did a clean install with upgrade to Vista, but then with the help of Mircrosoft support (and several hours of reformats and corrupt the old installation of XP) managed to get Vista installed hard disk new and active. I kept the old drive hard in the computer for about a year, but then noticed that he was starting to get out. I moved all the old information off the drive and recently bought a 1 TB drive to replace. I deleted everything that above with the exception of a few remaining files that won't let me not delete - documents and settings and startup records, respectively.

Problem:
When I take the old 40 GB hard drive to reside on Windows XP, my computer when startup is unable to find a drive it can boot from. Under disk management, it is labeled as system - even if the windows directory is on a completely separate drive. My intention was to replace the old hard drive, but I can't get my computer to recognize that it is not on the system drive somehow.

Question:
Is it possible to change what hard drive is recognized as a system disk or make sure I can get out the old hard drive and still keep my bootable system?

Hello Lightningfst,

Thanks for posting in the Microsoft answers Forum.  First off I would say that, before trying any of the suggestions I'm about to do that you completely back up the contents of the drive with Vista Business as a precaution.  The first suggestion I have is to copy the MBR of the disk of 40G to 250G drive.  It could be as simple as that.  However, when Windows sees a drive and initializes it, Windows writes a serial number of 4 bytes in the MBR (sector 0) of the disc. No matter what partition you create on this disc is then associated with the serial number and the drive letter that the partition is given.

When you then progress to clone a boot partition on the new disk with a cloning program that does not copy the MBR, the serial number of the old drive is not copied to the new disk, so the new disk retains its serial number Windows has seen before.

When Windows starts on the new disc, he sees the serial number of the new drive and guess the partition that is on that now belongs to the previously selected drive letter which is almost always not C:. Since installing Windows starts on C:, there is now no C: drive when Windows starts. Trying to connect allows Windows attempts to load the user from C:\Documents and Settings\registry, and the C: drive is not there, so Windows simply to abandon the attempt to logon and closes a session back.

If this happens to you after copy the MBR of the disk of 40G to 150G Unit let us know and we can help you solve the problems that.  I hope this information is useful.

Thank you

Jack

Jack
Microsoft Answers Support Engineer
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Tags: Windows

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