My son's system had an 8 Gb SCSI drive for his "C" drive. We bought him a 250 Gb IDE drive to replace it. We bought Norton Ghost v10.0 and used it to copy the SCSI drive to the IDE drive. I checked the boxes to make the destination drive the active partion and to have the master boot record copied. When done I disconnected the SCSI drive and made the IDE drive the master IDE drive.

The PC boots fine and starts bringing up Windows XP. It gets close to where the login screen would appear then stops. The wierd thing is that the mouse works but Windows never progresses. I tried booting in safe mode but with no success.

If I put the drives back to the original configuration and boot, the IDE drive looks good. I can access it via Windows Explorer. All the hidden and system files appear to be there. I tried doing the ghost copy again but with the same results.

Any ideas what could have gone wrong? Can you ghost from a SCSI drive to an IDE? Can you have a 250 Gb partition if it's NTFS?

Thanks in advance,

Bob

Hi elect_son.

First the easy one. Yes, you can have a 250GB partition/volume in XP. But why would you want to ? You would be much better off creating a 20GB partition just for the OS (C and then making 1, 2 or 3 more partitions out of the rest of the room. This way your son can keep all his important files on D:, E; or F:. Should he ever (when he) reinstalls XP he can just put it on C; and this will leave all his files untouched on the other partitions.

Be aware that if he does a Restore/Recovery XP install the procedure may wipe the entire hard drive. However, if you are using a SCSI drive I suspect that you have an XP Installation CD which allows full control over how the install is done.

I suggest you contact Norton/Symantec Technical Support for this problem. Using SCSI drives is almost archaic - there may be some "gotchas" you may not be aware of.