Error loading operating system

[Tiestarian]

I recently tried to clone my brothers hard drive to a new drive (in the same machine) with Acronis True Image. He's using XP Professional with SP2. This is what I've done:

1. First (current) hard drive plugged in as master.
2. Second (new) hard drive plugged in as slave.
3. Booted the first drive and went through the cloning process in true image leaving all the data on the original disk in tact.
4. He then used windows on the primary (old) drive for about a week with both drives plugged in.
5. After a week we changed them over so the new hard drive was master and the old hard drive was slave.
6. Tried to boot into windows with the new drive and got "Error loading operating system"

I then tried loading in recovery mode and using fixmbr and fixboot to no avail.

In the end I just swapped back to the old hard drive until we find out what went wrong.

Any ideas what happened? Could it be that we used the drive for week between swapping it?

Thanks in advance.

p.s. Let me know if you need more info.

[EzyStvy]

Right after the cloning when the pc shuts down - you MUST unplug the new drive. If you don't, it gets chnaged from having a C drive to some other letter....

[Tiestarian]

Tried again with what you said and it still wouldn't work.

Then I tried again with the hard drives "access mode" set to large in the BIOS. That worked but as it was booting into windows we kept getting a BSOD. Did a repair install of windows and finally got it to boot up.

Things are still really dodgy though.. it was asking for some PCI IDE drivers or something the first time it booted.. windows managed to automatically find them in the end but we now keep getting this BSOD error occasionally:

A problem has been detected and windows has shut down to prevent damage to your computer. MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION technical information: ***STOP: 0x0000009c (0x00000004, 0x805463F0, 0xb2000000, 0x00070f0f)

[glc]

You should NOT do the clone job in Windows - you do it by booting with the CD. I'd reclone.

You should not use Large - you should use LBA. I suspect that's what is causing the BSOD.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329284