My first time cloning a disk drive for a migration

I cloned my Toshiba satellite Pro A200 laptop HDD - 2* 2yr old 100GB Hitachi - onto a new 2.5" 250GB drive (WD Caviar black) using Paragon hard disk manager and a USB disk caddy. I selected the exact copy option (sector by sector). It took a while, I left it overnight! The old Hitachi drives were listed as C: and E:, and my new drive has two partitions representing the two old drives, which are seen in Windows Vista from the laptop as D: and G: (The DVD-RW is F:) and the files seem OK.

I installed the new drive carefully, it was just a matter of removing some screws and a plastic cover. I've put together a couple of PCs in my time so hopefully that went OK. Note that the old second HDD (the old data drive, E:) is still in there as I'd have to take the motherboard out to get to that one out.

The laptop no longer gets into Windows. It boots fine, so the drive is physically OK, but it cannot get any further, with a black screen asking for a repair disc (I don't have one for Vista, and I doubt a Win7 would work - plus no license for another install and the upgrade advisor says most of my drivers would no longer work).

Is it that the cloned drive has been named D: rather than C: ? I have a Linux boot disc that I could possibly use to rename it. Otherwise can anyone bung me a repair disc for a small amount of dosh? Or have I (more likely) missed something obvious?

Can you post (or PM if you'd prefer) the serial number for the machine, and then I can check some details.

Almost all Toshiba machines are sent out with one physical hard drive split into two partitions, rather than two physical drives (I can confirm that from serial). Having a quick look at the manual it would appear there isn't even a second HDD bay in this machine...

If you're desperate for a recovery disks and you haven't wiped the old drive, you should be able to make one using the recovery partition on it, and a program installed on there called Toshiba Recovery Disk Creator. If the old drive isn't working, disks are available from http://backupmedia.toshiba.eu

You can also contact us on 0844 847 8944 (local rate number) although we won't support the migration itself, we can definitely help with recoveries etc.

Edit: I'm pretty certain that if you've only got one OS on a machine then it needs to be stored on the C: drive, rather than anything else.

I'm making assumptions about the two hard drives - I can see something through a gap that looks like it might be another HDD, but I'm looking increasingly wrong on this!

I'll post the serial when I get back home - for now the full model is A200-26Q (T7500, Mobility Radeon HD2600, 200GB storage, 2GB RAM). There is only the original Vista install on the machine and this is the first time I have attempted to play with it (the warranty is now long gone!)

That's fine. FWIW, we provide tech support on machines that are out of warranty, it's just if there is a hardware fault then it's not going to be dealt with for free.

Makes life interesting when you get queries on 10 year old machines running Windows 98 (which I've never seen in my life!)

PM'd

You've never seen a machine running Windows 98? I feel old.

Me too.

Wow

Hokay, the disc image is on its way. I'm still stuck with trying to rename the drive letters though. Windows won't let you have two C: drives for obvious reasons, so I suspect I'll have to rename the drive when it's installed internally by booting from a CD. Can anyone help with this, aside from "wait for the recovery CD?"

Yes, I could just take it up the road to the computer shop. But then I'll never learn (albeit slowly!)

Have you tried putting the new drive in the machine and doing a fixmbr?

I should point out for you old farts that I started on MS-DOS 6.2, then went to Windows 3.1, then Windows NT 4.0 (that was from the time where MS allowed you to run a copy of the OS you used at work for personal use). As such I completely skipped 95, 98, ME, 2000 and went straight to XP.

Will I still need a Vista repair disc to use fixmbr? I have a repair disc for Windows 7 but suspect that might just break it

Then I should be able to rename the second partition to E: - I've put Office 2007 on there (and a couple of other programs) so it will probably just give a Gallic shrug when asked to run.

Anyhow, doesn't migration go more smoothly than this, if someone who actually knows what they're doing migrates a system, or is there always a prayer involved?

Never?

I still remember as a child being faced with windows and being confused that it bypassed the MS-DOS prompt. I felt like my hands were tied.

Usually if you use something like Acronis or clonezilla you simply tell it to clone the drive to the new one. Shutdown when finished & swap the drives.

That's what I thought I was doing - But the drive letters didn't behave themselves for some reason. But I plugged the drive into the laptop externally first to check the drive contents, which may have been where I went wrong.

Drive letters are assigned by the OS.
If you plug another Windows system drive in to a system that's running Windows it'll assign it different letters but when you put that drive in another machine it'd go back to being C:\

I'm guessing ether something didn't clone correctly or you've got a problem with the HDD controller listed in Windows.

You could download a free trial of acronis & try again.