Lost my XP after moving partition to new drive - how do I restore?

I upgraded my SATA drive from 500 to 1 Tb & used Acronis Disk Director to move all 8 partitions across to it. XP is still showing as the 1st partition, healthy, active etc, yet when I try to boot directly from it the PC just hangs & goes nowhere as if it was a data only drive.

Is there an easy way to fix this or am I going to have to delete it & reinstall or something - would really prefer not to have to do that even though it's not my primary OS only because I've a lot of settings within it that I'd rather not lose.

Try recovering/restoring xp from its bootable cd and see if it returns to its working condition.
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Hello TKR99,

Try this, be sure to read over very carefully; Also, if in a dual boot situation, unplug your other system drives as to just repair XP.

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install

Hope this helps

Don

Thanks guys - long forgotten that I'd had to do something like this a couple of years ago when I ran into errors with the installation, so some of it's coming back to me, but appreciate the pointers & info to help me get started all over again

You may have to update the MBR which you can do with the bootable CD of Partition Wizard. Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition.

The tool that whs suggested is the one that I use for these purposes, there's been a few times that I removed a Linux install & it rebuilt the MBR. Much quicker than the OS install disk could repair it.

Cat

Originally Posted by whs

You may have to update the MBR which you can do with the bootable CD of Partition Wizard. Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition.

I don't use a Boot manager to switch between the 2 OS' - instead use F11 at startup & select the XP drive when I want to load it. But I appreciate there may still be some additional work to do once I get it functional again - just have to wait & see. Will be tomorrow afternoon before I tackle it.

There is always a bootmgr. You just happen to have 2 seperate ones on 2 seperate disks. Switching with the BIOS boot sequence is a viable option. But that does not mean that the MBR on your XP disk could not be out of wack. But that, of course, is only one of several possible problems.

Ahh - good to know - will at least know what to do if needs be. Thanks, Romayne

Sadly the repair didn't quite go as desired. First time around the (repair) installation hung at 99% with a slew of files not being able to be copied - after about the 10th one I figured it was likely a dirty disc so popped it out, cleaned it, back in & the installation completed. Only problem was that after it rebooted, I was left back exactly where I'd been prior to the installation - with the cursor hanging up in the top left & acting as if it was being presented with a data drive rather than a functional OS.

SO, ok I thought - try another reinstall in case popping the disc out missed something etc. Only this time it wouldn't progress past 55% before doing the same thing with endless files not being able to be copied.

At this point I'm beginning to wonder if the partition is going to be recoverable in any sense (i.e. even with a full new installation), so am wondering whether it would be possible, to copy/backup the Windows partition, remove it, format the partition, install new copy of Windows, but then overwrite it with the old one again? I'm just keen to try & keep the programs etc that I have installed as they are as a few have awkward settings I wouldn't know where to start trying to regain.

Or does anyone figure there might be a simpler solution to it than that?