I recently purchased a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 320gb drive for a friend, to help them back up their system. I used the Maxtor Manager to create a Safetydrill copy of a 80gb (IDE) WinXP Home installation. The data on the drive totaled about 15gb. The first time I tried the system just reset itself at some point (I wasn't watching). The second time I attempted it seemed to complete without incident. I then disconnected that 80gb drive and installed a 300gb SATA drive. I booted off the Safetydrill CDROM, SD saw both the copy and the target HD. I initiated the restore, which took some time, and it appeared to complete without incident. I shut down SD, and rebooted -- that's when the trouble began.
I can't seem to get the restored WinXP to boot up. To be fair, I have not hooked the drive up along side a running WinXP installation to see if any of the data is actually on it. I don't recall the specific error I got, but it looked very much like the NTLDR error, only the sentence was slightly different -- something about a file error, but NTLDR wasn't mentioned specifically. The 300gb (target) drive did work before this, and it was being used as a storage drive.
At this point I'm not entirely sure what to do. Is there any way to check the integrity of the SD copy? Is there some step I'm missing that I must perform after restoring my SD copy? From what I've read Safetydrill ranks pretty low in quality and reliability -- has anyone had any experience otherwise?
I've read some stuff about DiscWizard and attempting the restore without any other USB devices plugged in... Has anyone had any positive experiences with these solutions? I also read some stuff about a small FAT32 partition (like some PC kit makers like to use) causing problems, but this 80gb drive has only one partition -- an NTFS partition, as far as I know. A few months ago I flattened that drive, myself, and installed WinXP Home.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated as I'm not really sure what to do next.
