Ghost image on new drive won't boot

I just purchased a new wd harddrive. I used ghost to make an image of my C: drive onto the new formatted drive. I set ghost to "image all" i have also used drive image 7.0. All of these give me the same results which are:

When I boot up with the new drive all seems to go well until I get to the screen that would normally be the log on screen. Instead of giving me the different log on names (i have two, one for me and one for the wife) it just says "Microsoft Windows Xp" and the mouse arrow is present on the screen and it moves around with the mouse but there isn't anything to click on.

Someone suggest fixmbr from the xp disk. After i do fixmbr on the drive then it just stops during bootup and says to insert system disk. It doesnt even get into the windows part of the bootup process.

I used ghost because I can't get Data Lifeguard to work. The drive is a retail version and the DL is version 11 which by checking their website is the latest version. I installed the windows version and when I try to launch it I get a windows error message saying it has performed an illegal operation. I removed it and downloaded it from the website and reinstalled the dloaded version just to see if that made any difference but it doesn't. Data Lifeguard disables my sound for some reason and the only way i can get it fixed is to do a system restore.

Here are some random thoughts:

could it have to do with the drive letters being different? the first partition on the original drive is C: and the first partition on the new drive is H:. during the recover console it lists it as c:\windows. since it is actually on the H: drive could that be the problem? do i need to somehow get the drive letter switched to c: before i do fixmbr?

the first partition on both drives are listed as primary and the second partitions on both are listed as logical

sorry for the long post but i am just trying to give all the necessary information:

any help is greatly appreciated

I'm not sure what you're referring to on the H: drive comment. The boot partition of Windows 2000 or XP must be on the first disk (Primary controller, Master device) on the first partition. That means it will (or should) ALWAYS be the C:\ drive.

If you have somehow worked around this so that the XP boot partition is drive H:, that would fully explain why it's not booting.

The original drive was split into 2 partitions. C and D
I split the new drive into 2 partitions also. There were assigned H and I

When I used ghost I chose copy partition. I chose drive C: (the one the original operating system was on) as the source and told it to copy to drive H: as the destination.

So this means, when I remove the old drive and try to bootup on the new drive, it is actually recognized by windows as being drive H not C.

Perhaps I should format and parition using fdisk instead of doing it in windows so I can assign the new drive the same letters (C & D)......

It might be that you first need to make that first partition "active" so that you can boot from it. Try that in fdisk before trying to re-format the drive.

I told drive image to mark it as active but it may not have done it. I will double check it first, thanks.

You might try formatting the new drive as one big partition. Then use ghost to image the C to the new drive. Then boot up on the new drive with the old drive disconnected. Then use partition magic to create the desired partitions on the new drive. Then reinstall the old drive and copy the other partition to the new drive.

I am not sure I understand what you did either.
You should be able to save a image to a seperate partiton or dirve.
Then install windows onto a new C: drive, then load ghost and restore the old image to C: Took me about 35 minutes total.

If you disconnect the old drive it is easy to rename the newer H: partition to C: in Windows XP.
right click my computer, manage, storage, disk management, right click on a drive letter and choose rename.

Then connect the old drive as a slave and rename the old C: drive

They are correct that the original drive should be disconnected after the Ghost before rebooting.This would force Windows to reassign drive letters upon reboot.If the original drive was formatted with one primary and one extended partition and it was copied this way then,when you reboot the first primary would be c but the second(also windows)would become D so it would not be able to map the associations and would continue seeking the correct D drive possibly forever.

Remember that windows will assign drive letters to primary partitions first,so if C and D are on the same drive they both need to be primary because adding another drive with a primary will assign it D(if the original D is in the extended DOS partition).

Formatting the partitions within windows first should be OK as long as both are primary so they will get consecutive letters,then after rebooting you can reinstall the old hard drive without having to reformat first and you can do what you like to it within windows.Hope i made sense.Good luck!