laptop migration (new HD!)

[olokiop]

I used Norton Ghost 9 to clone my 60G HD over to a new 160G. Now everytime windows boots it goes straight to the welcome screen then halts and never shows me the list of users to login. Also happens when booting to safe mode.

Anyone have any clue what the heck is going on? [or how to fix it +)]

[mattsiegman]

It probably has something to do with the fact that you're not using the same exact hardware, and windows thinks you are.

[djbitzc]

It wouldnt matter. I did find that when I coppied my hard drives I needed a computer I could boot from with the Target drive and Dest. drive attached.

One of the problems I did have with Ghost was getting it to copy.

I do not think it's your hardware but more of a boot issue.

[tinnel]

I gave up on Ghost years ago. IMHO it is an inferior product. I am using Acronis now. We had a drive fill up yesterday that caused the machine to not be able to boot. We simply booted from the Acronis disk, backed up the full drive to a network share, dropped in a new larger drive, and restored from the backup image on the network share. It booted immediately and we were back up in very short order. You can do the same thing using an external USB drive. I do it all the time.

Acronis has an added cool universal restore feature that lets you migrate a host image to a new piece of hardware. All you need is the drivers for the new hardware. We're testing this in our lab and it seems to be quite a sweet, time-saving feature... We make a single base image and then propagate it to all the various pieces of hardware in the lab.

[btimms]

Strong second on Acronis. Been using for couple of years now.

[JPC-NickO]

Hi olokiop,

Is this a new hard drive on the exact same hardware or a completely new laptop? If it is complete new hardware then your problem is that Windows cannot easily be switched between hardware environments.

I suggest you take a look at these articles for more information:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;249694
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;315341

Good luck.