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General discussion

Error loading operating system

by toryander Feb 13, 2009 4:19AM PST

I have an XP Home Edition computer with the Award Bios. I have a 40 GB hard drive which is too small now. Using Acronis I cloned the 40 GB HD to a 160 GB HD. When I view the contents both disks now look exactly the same. However, when I switch out the old drive with the new drive and power up I get "Error loading operating system." I checked the bios and it recognizes the drive just fine as the Primary Master.

Next I pulled out my XP OS disk and booted from it. Then I ran a repair. It copied all the files over to the disk and then restarted, but again I got the "Error loading operating system" message. When I plug the old drive back in it boots just fine. What am I missing here?

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2 Posts

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If you can't get it working ...

by Kees Bakker Feb 13, 2009 4:27AM PST

consider an alternative. Keep the old 40 Gb drive for Windows and (most) subfolders of Program Files. Use the 160 Gb drive for all data.

But as the new drive probably is faster, it's not the best solution.

Kees

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Resolved

by toryander Feb 17, 2009 1:58AM PST

Although I never did get the drive to boot after what appeared to be a successful cloning I was finally able to get the drive to boot after copying the windows setup files. I'll have to check an Acronis forum to find out more about the initial problem.

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