wassimmikati

Hi all,

I'm running a Dell Dimension 8400 desktop with 3Ghz processor, Windows XP Home SP2, 2GB RAM and 2 Western Digital 250GB SATA drives (no RAID but I frequently use Retrospect 6.5 to duplicate my C: drive to my secondary (E:) drive). The setup's about 3 years old.

Recently my C: drive has been full (I already have an external drive too), so I purchased a Samsung F1 1TB. I used it to replace the "secondary" drive.

Using the Disk Management tool I made a partition out of the entire drive, did a regular format, and marked the new partition as Active. I used Retrospect to duplicate my primary drive onto the new one, without a hitch.

I was under the impression that when I had a Duplicated drive I could boot from it!

When I switched SATA cables so that the new F1 1TB was the primary drive, I couldn't boot from it. I got the following error: "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware".

I switched SATA cables again and the computer started up OK, under the old configuration... but how can I make it so that the new drive is the primary drive?

My BIOS and my Disk Management tool both recognise the new drive's model and total capacity of 1TB. From what I can tell there are no jumpers on the new drive, and the jumper on the WD drive is set to the "default".

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks...

Wassim