Help please – PC won’t boot –stops at verifying DM1 pool

Here’s my sad tale. I have three drives. The original C: boot drive is an IDE ATA connected to an independent controller. The new drive is a SATA connected to independent SATA controller. There are no HDD connected to the on board controllers.

I was in the process if cloning the new SATA HD (the new boot disk holding XP and all programs). The copying went fine. Then I used Disk Director to change the letters of the old C: drive to L: and the new drive to C:. I then had DiskDirector convert the old boot drive to a logical partition and the new boot drive to Primary partition.

Upon final reboot, the PC hung up and didn’t boot. It will boot with the diskdirector boot CD. The converted drives have unallocated space and under editing say Reserved Primary, but the command to make either drive primary is grayed out.

What should I do to 1) So I don't have to totally reinstall XP etc?
What should I do to get the new SATA configured as the primary boot drive with proper MASTER BOOT RECORD?

Your advice will be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Ken

It is usually fatal to change the drive letter for any already assigned boot or system partition under winxp. It is by far and away best to only change drive letters using winxp's own disk management.

The best way to have attempted your cloning so that the new clone got the drive letter C: would be to have copied the partition (and only that partition) from one hdd to the other from partition utilities using a boot floppy or cd; (the drives should never "see each other" from within windows until the first drive letter assignment has been made). Then disconnect all drives before booting up to the newly cloned and only partition on the only attached HDD. This should "fix" the new drive with the drive letter "C". You can then reattach the other drive(s) and then go into WinXP's disk management and reassign those other drive letters any way that you like.

thanks - I was lucky...I unhooked my ATA drives and the SATA frive booted and all seems okay.

You might also have corrected things by changing the boot order in the bios setup. Sounds like it was just trying to boot from the wrong drive.

I think you're right. Thanks