Sorry, I gave up trying to work thru the problem.  Thanks for the effort.  Will have to try something else.  The solutions just were not relevent to my problem.  Can't understand how such a simple process (yea, I know it is very complex) can result in such difficulties.  Norton Ghost should work better as I really had the classic set-up and configuration that Ghost was designed for.  I try to keep things simple to avoid situations such as I encountered.   Fooling with the MBR  each time someone performs a simple HD to HD Clone makes the Ghost unusable for 90% of the people.

Suspect it is a Win Xp issue triggered by the cloning.

I'll trash Ghost and find something else.

  Well  guess what....... Most embarassing, It did fix the problem.  [blush, blush bright red] I finally found the old '98 Win boot disk and tried it booting to the floppy and it took right off after I used the command A: fdisk/mbr and re-booted to the new drive.

I formatted and updated the new drive as it has been some time, so  with no changes, the drive this time was  assigned  the letter "G" prior to cloning.

I have learned a lesson.  Listen to the experts.   I'm now using the new 15K drive.    I'll swap back and forth occasionally as a back-up.

Ghost has an issue there to try to fix as I can't imagine too many other folks going to this length to get it working. 

Thanks again for the help.  I was being a block head. 

Humbly Yours,

Taderbush

taderbush,

Great news. I'm pleased you are up and running.

It happened to me a few months ago while helping a friend upgrade to a larger laptop HD. I used images rather than a clone and I was surprised when the OS kept rebooting after entering a username and password at the Welcome Screen. I had done all those tests in the past with Ghost cloning but the drive letter issue after an image /restore surprised me. I was using Drive Snapshot for the image /restore and now I can't remember what I did wrong.

I hope you keep using Ghost 9. I'm very satisfied with its performance.

The 15K SCSI HD is nice.  But it is noticably faster  over the 10K machine which is also quite speedy.  Where it would have a "wow" factor I think would be over a 7200 RPM IDE drive.   I only paid $25 for it new at a swap meet. Which is cheaper than the Ghost program.  Everyone thinks they need a 200+GB HD and that is making some of these older SCSI fast HD's pretty cheap. I'm worried about reliability of these fast machines however, as I have had two 10K HD's crap out.    I have a fan attached to it so I hope it lasts.
Now I better get a new motherboard and really fast CPU.  I'm running an ASUS A8V MB and a 3500 AMD 64 bit CPU.

Again thanks for the help and advice.

Bill

The 15K Seagate HD is actually quite quiet. Nothing objectionable.  I hear more noise in the fans (six of them) than the HD.  Very nice and quiet HD.   The SCSI interface sometimes is a pain to administer.  Think SCSI is going away with the new RAID set-ups.