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I used gparted to clone a Windows XP boot partition from one hard disk to another (using the copy and paste function).

However, the new drive does not boot.

How can clone a bootable drive and verify that the MBR has been correctly cloned?

r2d3
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Tyler Durden
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  • A) You can boot Windows XP ISO and run a command from the recovery console to fix the MBR. B) make sure you made the partition you copied, the active partition. – barlop Apr 25 '21 at 22:50
  • C) You might get away with using gparted to copy a partition with XP, but it's generally safer to use a Windows tool to do it.. For example in Windows 7 there's a hidden partition that needs to be copied too. XP is probably ok..i'd think XP with MBR and gparted would be ok. But just letting you know re Win7. – barlop Apr 25 '21 at 22:53

2 Answers2

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Cloning the MBR is not part of cloning partitions.

If you had followed my advice on your duplicate duplicating question here

Reliable way to move WinXP OS to a new hard drive

you would not have faced trouble. There are some reasons why I recommended it and you might discover the other ones sooner or later.

r2d3
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You could try repairing your cloned Windows XP drive using a Windows boot CD as described in the gparted FAQ:

The following commands are entered at the command line when using the Recovery Console from the Windows XP installation disk.

To repair the Master Boot Record of the boot disk: fixmbr

To write a new partition boot sector to the system partition: fixboot

To rebuild the boot.ini configuration file: bootcfg /rebuild

For more details refer to the following links: Fixmbr, Fixboot, Bootcfg

I think the easiest way to clone a bootable drive is to use disk cloning software. Gparted made it on the list, but it is more of a partition manager than disk cloning software. Disk cloning software will make sure the cloned drive has the correct partition scheme (MBR rather than GPT for Windows XP), it will set the boot partition as active, and it will allow you to clone the boot sector.

The disk imaging software I would use is CloneZilla.

A few notes:

  1. You might need to use the "Expert mode" menu to enable the -rescue option so it will continue even if the hard drive reports read errors.
  2. It might fail to clone if the drive has filesystem corruption problems. You would need a clean chkdsk run (chkdsk /f /r c:) before it will successfully clone, but you could configure it to clone using the "raw sector copy" approach which would ignore filesystem corruption (use the -q1 option in the "Expert Mode" menu).
  3. On old hardware, you might have limitations on how large your replacement drive can be. In one case, I had to update the BIOS firmware to enable it to recognize drives larger than 100GB.
James T
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