Sector copying XP from IDE to eSATA then using it as boot drive

I've done a sector by sector copy of my internal IDE drive on my Dell Latitude D620 to an external drive which has USB, eSATA and Firewire interfaces. I'd like to use it as the boot drive for a Latitude E6410 with an eSATA connection. (the BIOS supports this as a boot option)

The E6410 recognizes the drive connected via eSATA as a valid boot option, It will start to boot, display the XP splash screen, then continuously loop back to the beginning of the process.

I believe it's because there is no driver installed for the eSATA. If this is the case, can I modify XP so that it will recognize the eSATA drive short of completely re-installing XP?

 

the E6410 seems like it could be running in ahci mode in the bios..the reboots are actually bsods...if you turn off ahci mode and change it to compatible ide it should boot.... then I would defiantly install the chipset and ahci driver..

 

If I change the BIOS to be compatible with IDE (ATA), then the eSATA device is not recognized on boot.

Any other ideas?

 

Yes. The problem is not in the bios; it may work if you edit the ARC path in boot.ini. but it may not work at all since the OS install is simply not going to be able to find all of its files.

Windows XP uses the ARC path (Advanced RISC Computing) to LOAD the windows installation.

Works like this...

XP Computers start up and the bios says look at the designated boot drive. The hardware looks at the boot drive MBR (master boot record), which then hands the boot off to the PBR (partition boot record) which then looks in the ARC path to find out where the windows installation is.

An ARC path looks like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows XP Home"

Each of these things means something.

The multi(x) parameter is used to set the disk controller number, where x=0,1,2,. In most computers the multi(x) parameter is always followed by disk(0).

The "rdisk(n)" parameter is for the HDD drive number on the controller, where n=0,1,2,... depending upon which physical drive this HDD is in your system. So, for example, the primary master is 0, the primary slave would be 1. the secondary master might be 2, etc....

The "partition(p)" parameter is its partition on that drive, where p=1,2,3,... in order, counting from a 1 (it does not start at zero like the previous two designations).

I honestly don't know what an arc path for a external esata might be. Probably the best way to determine if this has any chance of working is installed a new copy of windows to the esata, noting the arc path, and then editing the boot.ini on your sector by sector copy

 

With my limited knowledge on this kinda thing, the only thing in the way of using XP via eSATA is having the SATA drivers in your XP installation. This is normally done by getting a WinXP ISO, ripping it to your copmuter, downloading the correct SATA drivers, using nLite to slipstream the drivers into the ISO and then burning the ISO back to disk. You can then use that disk to install XP on the HDD and use it via eSATA.

There was a time when I thought I couldn't use the XP virtual machine on Win7, so went through the hassle of learning all of this so i could have a seperate XP installation. I have successfully booted XP from my eSATA. But but but... on the VAIO, the eSATA is regarded as an internal connection, not an external boot. What this meant to me was that one of the times I installed XP onto the drive connected externally, but still had my SSD in the main spot, my system then set up as a dual boot. I had to start over to fix that problem. Essentially, if you have an OS internally and an OS externally via eSATA, your computer just may not like that and have a hard time booting one over the other. That's just my experience with VAIO though.

EDIT:
On another thought. If you use a sector copy of your XP installation won't it carry with it all of the hardware drivers for your other lappy? If they're not the same as the new machine, you'll have to change them all around. Would it not be better to just do a fresh XP installation?

 

XP tends to get really unhappy running on hardware that it wasn't installed on. As does Windows 7. Windows is really not built as a hardware-portable operating system. If it even boots you'll end up "reinstalling" and rebooting a few times every time you boot up on a new system.

But you may want to just download the SATA drivers on your previous machine, force install them and then re-image the external disk if that's possible. That's the only thing I can think of that may work short of a complete reinstall.