I got a new hard drive from Western Digital because my original makes a really high pitch noise that drives me crazy. I installed the new drive, set it up as a slave and set the old one as the master. My plan was to create an exact copy of the old drive onto the new and pick right up where I left off. I formated the new drive in windows, made it NTSF, and gave it a letter. I downloaded a program called Casper XP to create the copy, selected the drive to copy and then selected the new drive, F, as the target. When I hit the start button my system restarted and went to a blue "stop" screen with a stop error at the bottom. The page told me to start windows in safe mode. I tried that and it kept going back to the stop screen. The only way my computer will boot into windows is to totally disconnect the new drive. It goes to the stop screen if the new drive is connected no matter what I do. What can I do to make this new drive work again?? I'm running windows XP. Thanks.

How are the jumpers set on the back of the two drives? Master, Slave or are they set to cable select (CS)?

If you run fdisk, can you see if one of the partitions (or the only partition) is set to be the active partition on the new drive...

You can find fdisk.exe on google easily enough...

Mmmmm, info goood.

I've tried every different jumper configuration possible. When I first installed the drive I had the old one set as master and the new set as slave. It didn't work like that after the program made my puter reset. Since, I have tried puting them both on CS and every other imaginable configuration and the same thing happens. After detection of the IDE drives, which shows the master and slave correctly, it prompts me to choose Safe mode or windows. I have tried both and I get the blue stop screen with a stop error at the bottom. The computer works fine when I totally disconnect the new drive.

Pass, that's the extent of my troubleshooting exp. with hard drives, anone else?

You did check with fdisk that there was an active partition on the new hdd right? (I may be wrong, but I think that can stop a new hdd showing up) No idea why it won't just boot off the old one though...

1st, im not familiar with casper xp, but if all it does is "copy" a hard drives contents, then you are not gonna have much luck with booting from it since there are some very important areas (such as the MBR and boot sector) that arent transferred very well or at all when just doing a drive copy, what i would suggest is that you do everything in your power to back up everything from the non-bootable drive to the one that boots, fdisk the drive and make sure the partition you create is a primary dos partition, format the drive using xp's disk utilitites from the cd, and install the os, once yer done with all that, copy yer stuff from the old drive to the new one, and format the old drive....easy, just 346 simple steps

Yah what he said.
Just don't make the mistake of not installing your firewall and antivirus protection first.
Just speaking from my recient demize of upgrading to XP

Ahh all set now. I fdisked the new drive after Casper XP f'ed it up. I then tried Western Digital's utility that is supposed to make an exact copy of my drive and be bootable. Took about 7 hours the first time and didn't work. Called Western Digital, they told me to fdisk the drive again, put it on a seperate IDE channel as the master and try again. 6 hours, 45 minutes and 96% later it froze up on me. Finally I found a trial version of Paragon's Drive Backup software, it took 20 minutes and it worked perfectly, booted into windows on the copied drive on the first time. I would highly recommend Paragon Drive Backup since it did what Western Digital failed to do in 20 minutes instead of 7 hours.