Hard drive clone- need help to boot new disc.

Hello,
I have a 500 gig internal hard drive that does not work occasionally, the system crashes and I get a disc error. So, I cloned a new 500gig hard drive through the Seagate Disk Wizard. The software labeled the new drive as F:\. On an explore the new F drive seems to have all of the cloned files. When I disconnect the old drive the new drive will start to boot through Windows XP(64). When it gets to the "Windows is starting" screen it just shows the Windows XP icon and hangs- will not load to a desktop.
I am currently working with the old drive as the system will reboot with the old configuration and old drive hooked up.
I thought that the Seagate software was suppose to do everything. Do I need to somehow relabel that drive to C:\ instead of F:\?
I also plan on installing Windows 7 when the system is up and working with the new drive.
Please advise.
Thank you
Mark

If you are planning to install WIN7, I would do that right away on your new drive. Much better/cleaner than first install WINXP followed by an upgrade.

So how many times have you picked up AAKKds?

Thank you for the advise.
Can you walk me through the process to clone the old hardrive to the new one with Win7 installed? I would prefer to clone the hardrive so I dont have to reconfigure or reinstall all of the email, software, hardware and data.
Please advise.
Mark

iplo4fun wrote:

I would prefer to clone the hardrive so I dont have to reconfigure or reinstall all of the email, software, hardware and data.
Please advise.
Mark

I´m afraid that´s what you are going to have to do. There is no cloning from one OS to another. Just reinstall programs and configure them. It will costs you some hours, but at the end it will be all clean and fresh and working optimally. Depending on your software, you may be able to transfer over some config files, your outlook .PST file and that kind of stuff.

If I might suggest: when you install WIN7 on your 500GB HD, make two partitions. One of about 50-100GB for your operating system and programs (depending on the size of your programs, make it closer to 50 or 100GB) and one for your data (movies, music, pictures, documents, etc).
It is a good idea to separate your personal files from your system, for e.g. backup purposes. For instance, I keep an image of my fully functioning system partition on my data partition (using CloneZilla, for WIN7 you also need to make an image of the 100 MB system minipartition that is created during install). If I get into trouble with my system (malware or some corrupt syste file) I recuperate my system partition very easy without needing to spend hours on re installing.