stupid me doing stupid things: XP drive upgrade

(I know there's a bunch o' nerds here, so I'm hoping someone can steer me the right way.)

So I have a 40GB drive that I want to COMPLETELY copy over to a new 250GB partition (on a 500GB drive). I have already verified that the PC can see both 250GB partitions when the 500 is connected as slave to the existing 40GB. It's all NTFS. The 40 boots XP fine. "Just reinstall everything" is not an option because I am "helping" a "family member" who fails to comprehend the importance of "backing yo' sh!t up".

I have a separate workstation with 1394 (Firewire) and plenty of internal storage. I'm plugging the 40GB and 500GB into an external FW enclosure to "copy from" and "restore to".

I have used both Nero BackItUp and Norton Ghost to image the 40 onto the separate workstation's internal HD, and then restore that data onto the first 250. But in either case, the new drive doesn't boot, even though both utilities completely copy the ntldr/io.sys/whatnot files. Should I not be operating with the separate workstation?

What am I doing wrong here? (I mean, besides posting this query at nearly 6pm on a Friday...)

Just throwing this out there -

Did you set the bootable flag when you ran fdisk? Has the BIOS been set to boot off of that drive?

I haven't been DOSing, so no fdisk -- just Nero and Norton so far. I experimented with BIOS to put the HD first in the boot sequence, so we're definitely seeing the new drive.

And I just finished the same process with a single partition on the 500, so it's not the partitioning. (Which I expected, but I'm kind of flailing here.)

I use Linux tools when I work with moving drives around, and I think I remember that MS products require the boot sector to be marked bootable to boot, but again, I'm not sure, and I forget the dos commands for fdisk (I'm on a Debian laptop at the moment). I know that my XP partition has the bootable flag set.

Hope this helps, but it probably doesn't.

There are a lot of hidden files...

The last time I did a disk transfer was by booting up another PC with the drives hooked up to it then using it to do an extended xcopy from a dos prompt.

It gives you options to copy system and hidden files plus all the permissions and attributes.

OH, and YES you do need to have the partition flagged as bootable and it needs to have a Master Boot Record written to the drive before you can boot it properly.

RJ

Use fdisk to make it a boot partition or search google for making XP a boot partition.

Righto, looks like time for some DOS fu. Will try these on Monday and report back. :)

MBR FTW!

I'm ashamed to admit that I found an MBR flag in Ghost, so I never got to try it with the command line. (Tired of messing with it.) Maybe next time...

Thanks again, y'all. :D

w00t!