T23,new 7k60 travelstar hd, won't boot

[junga]

I am upgrading the 4k30 stock hd on my T23 with a new 7k60 (hitachi travelstar 08K0939) . I used ghost to image the old drive onto the new but it won't boot off the new drive. After POST I get a blank screen with a blanking cursor.

Just won't boot -- other access OK: The drive is visable on the machine if I boot from a floppy and run fdisk. Also if I put it in a usb case and boot from the old drive, windows can access it and it looks like a copy of the original (this is n the T23).

Tried Imaging Twice: Both times used ghost 2003. Once imaged drive->drive. 2nd made partitions by hand and did partition->partition. Both times same symtoms as above. Used a desktop PC with the old, 30gig on a 2.5 ide adapter and the new, 60gig on a USB enclosure.

Active partition: The first time there was only one partition and it was set to active. The second time. There are two partitions. One partition was made by the Recovery CD before it failed (see below). If I make that partion active, it boot to a dos prompt (left over from the failed recovery partition. If I make the other partition (the one imaged from the old drive) active, it hangs as described above.

Tried recovery CD: (Not that I want to do this but just to see if it would) My stock drive does not have the IBM recovery pertition anymore. But, I have the IBM recovery CD (or is it a DVD? its one disk). First pass through at about 6% complete it just reboots (unexpected,sudden reboot). Then running again, it says it needs to install itself on the hard drive and reboot -- which it appears to do but then when it boots off the new recovery partition, I just get a c:\ prompt.

No hard drive info is BIOS setup!When I boot into the BIOS setup program, I am surprised to find no information on the IDE bus or drives! I've been through every option. Not even a list of attached drives. Same with the old, working drive installed. Is it right that there is no mention of drives in the BIOS?

Upgraded BIOS (1.18 ) and Embed Controller (1.06) (Fresh as of 12-06-04)

Ran Drive Fitness test with the drive in the T23 and it passes.

Called IBM:Its recently out of warentee. The CSR was nice enough to talk to me about it anyway. He ended up suggesting that I return i this travelstar drive and buy one (the exact same one?) from him .

What else can I try? I don't think the drive is bad, so RMA'ing it seems pointless. I have seen posted that suggest this drive should work in this T23. Does anyone know differently?

Anybody got any ideas?

--BobG[/b]

[tselling]

you might try a different software package than ghost. I have had good luck with Acronis TrueImage and also BootItNG. The last one is free to try for 30 days.

[JHEM]

Just won't boot -- other access OK: The drive is visable on the machine if I boot from a floppy and run fdisk.

FDISK /MBR

Regards,

James

[junga]

I am posting the solution in case anyone has a similar problem.

The problem was that the PBA (partition boot area) on the WinXP partition was corrupted in my original working disk. I don't know why, but even though BootITNG reported that it was bad, it worked in the old drive, but prevented the copied partition from working.

I used the BootItNG program that tselling recomended and I loved it. I like it much more than ghost. It allows you to view the MBR and other boot related data on the disk.

I ran BootItNG with the non-booting new drive in the machine. When I selected to view the partition details, it prompted me that the PBA was invalid, do I want to fix it. That was the fix.

The web site for BootItNG (I forget the company name) has a good FAQ on boot problems for various OS's.

--BobG

[JohnDrake]

When picking up the image from the "donor" machine, use the Ghost command line switch -ib