Cannot boot a cloned Windows XP Pro Drive

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Greetings . . .

The boot drive [of my other PC] is a Maxtor 250 GB ATA133 drive running Windows XP Pro SP/2. I recently bought an IDENTICAL MAXTOR drive to use as a full system backup.

Both drives are housed in an "InClose" dock/tray configuration and both are set to "Cable Select" mode.

I created and formatted a Primary partition on the "backup" drive and successfully (?) copied the boot partition to it using the MAXTOR utility software MaxBlast.

When I boot my system using the copied drive, everything appears normal through POST, but once my "settings are loaded", the Taskbar flashes only briefly then disappears and the Desktop comes up with no icons!

Basically, I have a blank screen!

A right-click on the empty desktop does not bring up the context menu [E.g., to Refresh the desktop, etc.]

A can bring up the Task Manager using CTRL-ALT-DEL and run tasks from there or start a CMD window and run tasks from the command line (E.g., Notepad.)

However, I noted that "explorer.exe" was not listed in the Task Manager "Processes" tab, so this key component is not active.

I tried running the a System Restore to a Restore Point prior to copying the drive, without any luck (cannot be restored that that Restore Point.)

Have I run up against a Windows Licensing limitation [I.e., cannot clone the O/S?]

Does anyone have an idea how I can fix my problem? Or is re-installing the XP Pro SP/2 Upgrade over the top of the new drive the only way of getting the copied drive running properly?

Does anyone have any suggestions about a better disk clone utility, preferably one that is fast and does not run in Windows mode . . .?

Many thanks in advance for your replies!

G.
 
You should have "cloned" the working boot drive to the new Maxtor not backed it up to the new Maxtor.

For the hard drive install program (MaxBlast), you should have chosen something like "install the new drive as the boot drive keeping or discarding the old drive". Setup will copy all files from the old drive to the new drive... Something went wrong with your imaging

I use Acronis True Image to image my C drive, but I have to use Acronis to restore the image... I would do this to repair my broken XP install. Acronis also has a cloning utility to completely replace a Boot Drive
 
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