New HD MIA?

[sharpshooter1]

I have just finished coping/cloning my old 30g HD to a new 160g via usb/ide cable on my toshiba 1415 laptop. I used Norton Ghost which stated using the Copy MBR option I would "not" have to format the new drive. It took me over six hours to do this because of a overheat shut down during the first period which forced me to start over again. Now with the new drive complete I installed it in the machine and on bootup got a "NTLDR is missing" message on the first try. After going into Disk Management (WinXP) I noticed that the new drive now had three partitions, two the very same size as the old hard drive and the last unallocated. I looked at the files in the first partition and found I did not need them so I deleted the files and the partition. The remaining active partition has all the op files I need so I assigned this a drive letter. Now on bootup with the new drive I get “Missing operating system” message. I’ve changed the boot order and tied to boot off of the Ghost CD but had no luck with that either. Obviously the machine is not seeing the drive so my question is how can I get it to see the new drive letter on boot when it now only looks for a C:\ drive? The only option I see in the BIOS is boot order change. Thanks

 

[Tmagic650]

You should have used the drives manufacturer's installation software to do the cloning and setup of the new drive. It's a little tricky to do in a single drive system. I place the new drive in an external enclosure connected to the laptop through USB. I run the drives install software in Windows. When you start the cloning process the external drive will be an exact duplicate of the old drive. Turn off the laptop, install the newly cloned into the laptop and boot