I bought the system as a kit:

Intel D945GCCRL Socket 775 Barebone Kit Pentium D 940 OEM 250GB SATA HDD 512MB DDR2 PC4200 Mid-Tower Case wa 450 Watt PS FREE Ghost Recon 3: Advanced Warfighter PC Game (First 500 orders) at TigerDirect.com

Right now I have the defective drive in as well as the new drive. Windows is booted up on the bad drive as we speak. I tried to ghost Windows off of the bad drive and onto the new with Norton Ghost. It's all there, an exact duplicate of the C drive. So I shut down, unplugged the bad drive, and plugged the new drive into the same slot as I just unplugged the bad drive from, and it wont boot. It's almost like a new sata drive needs something done to it before you can load anything onto it.

The bad drive is an Hitachi. The new drive is in fact a Maxtor

I am not at all familiar with Ghost-- though I've read good things about it... my SATA drives are both Hitachi Deskstars (been rock-solid for years) -- I will ask around --to see if anyone has any ideas-- it may be that just a few critical files got hosed on the "bad" drive or even in the Ghosting process... hhmmm.

It also may make a difference due to Windows installation-- the 1st thing Setup does is "examining" hardware configuration. So by going from a Hitachi to a Maxtor --you have -- in fact changed that configuration.
I wonder if a "repair installation" on the ghosted copy using Windows setup could fix this... it could be worth a shot-- you would have to unplug the old drive first-- or disable it in the BIOS...

When the Ghosting process was done it even gave that drive the same "Name" as the C drive, but, the drive letter is of course, different. I wonder if that has something to do with it.
When you install a drive, is it assigned a drive letter right then? The reason I ask is because the drive that I Ghosted the OS onto is assigned the drive letter F. Now, if I unplug the C drive, and plug this HD with the drive letter F into the same slot as I just unplugged the C from, will this F drive automatically be assigned the drive letter C?
Does that make any sense?

Yes-- it would make a difference I believe-- and I'm researching onling to see if it can be fixed from the Setup CD --using the Repair Console--a moment or 2 please

As a matter of fact, I tried the repair on the ghosted copy. I got up to where they wanted the administrator password, and I got stuck. I have no passwords on that system. I can't get by that part. It wants a password. It very well may work if I could get pass this password deal. (I completely unhooked the C drive, and plugged the ghosted drive in where the C drive was when I tried the repair).

I believe you could use the bootcfg command the the Recovery Console to change your Master Boot Record...

Step1 Unplug the bad drive (the surest method)
Step 2 Boot from the Setup CD
Step 3 Enter the recovery console--note: This thing does not use mice ....you must use the arrow keys to navigate
Step 4 This gets a little scary-- the recovery console shoud automatically recognze the windows F drive and ask you which installation (only one) you wish to log into. in XP Home there is no admin password-- you'll see a F:> hit enter
TO EXIT THE CONSOLE (when you wish): Type exit at the prompt --hit enter

The screen is all black-- no graphic interface
The easiest way to reset this for some not familiar with these commands is to use Bootcfg[rebuild]

this should automatically scan the drive and fix the MBR so you can boot. You will see warning messages, etc-- but what do you have now? the worst that could hapen is that you have to re-install, right?

This page contains a lot of the Recovery Console references-- a lot of them refer to Windows Server 2003-- does not matter-- they do not change. If you have any trouble you can type Bootcfg /? (note the space between the bootcfg --and the slash and ?. You must use that space. (tip)
Microsoft Corporation


Recovery Console-- while a limited tool... has saved my bacon a few times.It is a little scary at first --do not fear.