My current drive is on its death bed so I have been trying to clone it for quite some time now.
I have tried both Norton Ghost and Acronis true image.
I have been trying to clone my 320gb 7200RPM Sata Seagate drive onto a new 160GB 7200RPM sata seagate.
I only have about 60 gigs of data on the 320gb drive however, so the drive size difference really should not matter.
Using Norton Ghost I was able to clone the drive (sort of) the resultant was a drive which would not boot. I had to do a chkdsk /r and a fixmbr along with running the windows installer at start up in order to get the drive to even boot. In the end, what resulted was an essentially copied drive, however one which microsoft says is using a stolen/counterfeit copy of Windows Xp Media edition (although my computer was a box set with the edition pre-installed, and I used the included windows cd for the recovery of the cloned-to drive rofl) The drive also was missing almost every driver from the old drive.
I was not prepared to spend days or weeks downloading dozens and dozens of drivers again and then sorting out the broken files and the what not. So I formatted the cloned-to drive and attempted again. To no avail.
I then switched to trying an image clone software called Acronis True image. This seemed to work alright, however it too will not boot on startup. I am being told NTLDR is missing on startup and that I can not go any further (logically, considering NTLDR is the master boot rofl) [PS. I attempted a Chkdsk /r and a fixmbr. Neither worked]
I am running through this topic (http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm) and trying to find which one matches my problems, although I can see that too will take several days as well. Which I do not wish to waste.
I was wondering if someone here could tell me why my drives are not cloning properly? I have both attempted to clone using my own hand and ways, along with using tutorials. Neither approach works for me. Could it be that my new drive is defective? Or is the fact that my old drive is horrible cursing the clone?
ANY help would be appreciated. Thank you and goodnight