Nice to see there's still life in this XP part of the forum.
Using Macrium Reflect Free version 7.2 in a bootable USB stick, I finally cloned my XP drive from my Momentus XT hybrid drive that seemed to stutter (the source) to a plain vanilla WD hard drive.(the destination). This was a direct clone - I had both drives inside my machine (an Optiplex 755 Desktop with 4GB RAM) when I ran the clone.
Immediately after the clone, I shut down, removed the Momentus XT, moved the WD to the SATA cables that used to go to the Momentus XT, rebooted using the Macrium USB stick into the Macrium PE environment and used the Macrium to "Fix Windows Boot Problem". (I did this because a prior effort to clone the Momentus XT onto this WD failed with BSOD screens when I tried to boot up the WD.)
Well, with one exception, the clone seems to be working fine 12 hours later. Still keeping an eye on it.
Here's the issue -- and, remember, I now have only the clone WD hard drive in the machine.
In Explorer, in addition to the C:\ drive (good), I am also seeing a D:\ drive that seems to be the bootup (MBR?) partition. I would NOT normally expect it to have a drive letter or be visible in Explorer. If it's visible, I might screw it up someday.
- What should I do? Just eliminate its drive letter in Disk Management? Should I go into Safe Mode first to do that?
- Will the machine still find it to re-boot next time?
- If the machine can't find it and won't re-boot next time, what would I be able to do to re-assign it as D:\ and so at least be able to re-boot?
By the way, I'm a lawyer, not a tech person, and I don't know what I'm talking about. (We lawyers never do - we just make it up as we go along, which is why you can't understand us. And then we send you a bill) I don't know what MBR means. I can tie my shoelaces and boil water, but that's about it.
I don't seem to be able to insert any graphics here, but here is a link to a png of a screenshot of what this D drive looks like.
https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZ2dJJkZwAFz8nML7LkBhJcYaUFWTVvhGkw7
Looks like the bootup - MBR partition, yes?
Now, here's a link that shows what my Disk Management looks like:
https://my.pcloud.com/publink/show?code=XZltJJkZXktXYt3NRQHOEz3yFnTGaJaiYDLV
(Those two partitions on the left surrounded by a green border are deeply hidden partitions that were on the Momentus XT when I removed it from my wife's laptop ages ago. I wanted to use the Momentus XT in my XP machine but also wanted to preserve those partitions. They are not active and the XP machine has never noticed them (good).
The two partitions that count are the two on the right. I can't do a screenshot, but if I right-click the D: partition, I see an option to "Mark partition as active", which I suppose means it is not active yet. If I right-click the C: partition, that option is greyed out, which I suppose means the C: partition is already active, which makes sense.)
So - should I just use Disk Management to remove the D: drive letter from that partition? But please see my questions 2 and 3 above.
Thanks.