My husband brought a new Western Digital 120 GB SATA hard drive as a gift for my birthday. I have a 40 GB Western Digital ATA drive as the primary master and two CD-RWs as primary and secondary slaves. The new drive came without drivers and there was no problem with the installation neither setting it up because the system inmediately recognized it as SATA DISK_0. I formatted it using the System Manager that comes with Windows XP. No problem except that the letter Windows assigned to it was F: (the next available). I even tested it copying some files from the old ATA and everything worked fine. Next, I used the COPY DRIVE function in Norton Ghost 9.0. The process completed without trouble, so I shutdown, disconnected the ATA and booted again. To my surprise, Windows came normally until the login screen, then started to ask my password repeatedly. I have never had a password to access my computer! The only thing it lets is reboot or shutdown so I reconnected the old drive and booted to find that Windows can see the SATA and all the files that Ghost copied. What did I do that was wrong? Thanks in advance.

Did you make the drive active? It needs to be active to boot.

Thanks, Rich Mentzel, for using your time trying to help me. Of course, when partitioning I made myself sure that the only partition the disk has was active. Besides, the system starts well, it even reaches the login screen. This could not be possible at all with a non-active partition. Thanks again.

I've seen this happen when the "SAM" file got corrupted, all of a sudden Windows will start asking for a passward. As long as you can access the data by booting with your first disk, you can restore the five main system files that Windows needs to run from within the restore files on the disk with the damaged file system. They're named "System, software, default, security and sam" and they're found in "snap" folders in the "System volume information" folder. I'll post back in a minute and give you a link for step by step instructions on how to do this. It will make a lot more sense then if I tried to explain it :) Musky If the voices inside my head paid rent, I'd be rich!

OK, Here's the link. It explains how to do the restore from the recovery counsel, but since you can access the drive that is having problems booting, you can do this from within windows. So read the article, but you can go right to the part that tells you where these backup files are (in the system information folder) and then you can just copy and paste them into the Windows\system32\config folder of that drive. Windows won't let you do it with the drive that is currently in use as the "system" disk, but you can do it with what is, at the moment a slave drive. Here's the site, sorry I can't provide a link but I'm not on my computer right now: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q307545 Good Luck! Musky If the voices inside my head paid rent, I'd be rich!

Thanks, Musky, I got it and will proceed immediately. I'll post back later to let you know what I found. Thanks again.

Oops I misread the login screen for Windows XP screen, happens when you read too fast. I have had this happen occasionally where I switched out a hard drive. If you can get past the login screen by clicking in the box and entering nothing for password, Tweak-ui(XP Power Toys) can remove that by setting it for auto logon and doing the same thing with putting in no password.