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The system is an Advent 5301 laptop, and I'm trying to swap the hard drive for one of a larger capacity (120 -> 320 GB). I used Clonezilla to directly copy the original drive to the target drive, but when I try to boot from the target drive I get a blank screen or a BSOD after the Windows Vista green loading bars. The system restarts too quickly to read the BSOD message.

I can boot into safe mode; I booted with networking enabled to check for a driver for the new hard drive. Windows couldn't find an updated driver, and is convinced that the current driver is up to date.

The original hard drive was running in IDE mode, and the target drive was previously running in AHCI. However, I assumed that the BIOS would apply the correct setting on boot and if this was incorrect, it wouldn't get to the Vista loading screen? OR is this a driver thing, applied once Windows has booted, which would explain why safe mode works but normal boot doesn't?

If I press F8 on boot, and select "Repair your computer", I get a blank screen and the laptop reboots. I don't currently have access to a repair disc, but I could get one if necessary.

One last observation: when the laptop hangs on the blank screens, the hard disk activity light blinks once a second or so, and it sounds like the hard drive is powering on/off repeatedly. I noticed the original hard drive draws 1A while the target drive draws 1.55A - could this be an issue?

Any help on this is much appreciated!

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  • Thanks for all the answers! I won't be able to try anything out until I'm back home, but I'll keep you posted.
    – TheTurkey
    Commented Apr 16, 2014 at 11:10

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Windows does a lot of configuration and optimization to do with the hardware abstraction layer during the initial install. If you pulled it from a sata drive set to IDE mode, it will want to run on the new AHCI setup as IDE, which won't work. You'll need to either run windows setup again and do a repair install, or re-apply the original image over the top after changing the drive to IDE in the bios.

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If you clone an HDD 1:1 and the new HDD won't boot, you might need to fix the MBR because it didn't got cloned properly.

In the Hirens Bood CD, there's a tool called mbrfix which will fix the master boot record of a harddrive. Use with care though.

The command would be something like:

mbrfix /listdrives

to get the drivenumber, and then:

mbrfix /drive:0 /fixmbr

to fix the drive.

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Get a repair disc and run a chkdsk, something like Hirens Boot CD might be worth using to do the fix.

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