I have tried to upgrade my main hard drive on XP with no luck. I installed the new hard drive and used Ghost to clone the main HD. It is a perfect copy or so it seams, yet, I can't boot from it. It gets to the boot log screen and stops. I can have it as a slave and can see the exact files that it has on C: but for some reason it won't boot with the new one. I have checked all the slave/master settings etc. Am I doing something wrong? Is the some tye of protection going on? Any help would be appreciated. I am very frustrated.

you need to have your new disk as the primary master for it to boot.

Yes, I did that. And it stops on the 'checking boot record' black screen. I can't get past that part.

I found out the hard way that xp doesn't like ghost 5.75. It screws up the boot sector. Ghost 5.61 seems to work fine. You might try to go to the recovery console and fix the boot sector. There's a chance that might work before you go to the trouble of re-ghosting.

Is this a Maxtor diamond max? I have a new Maxtor that neither ghost nor casper xp will clone and boot.

Yes, its a Maxtor. Not sure what model. Its a 20gig, 5400rpm hard drive. I can clone it, or it appears to be cloned, as I can compare all the files when its installed as a slave. I just can't boot from it. Seems to be a XP activation thing. Which is fine, but I can't get past the black screen to do anything else.

That's the same problem I have. I was able to clone it using the casper xp trial version, then when going to repair console, "restore previous settings that worked". Go google, casper xp, download the trial version and try that. I had a long conversation with the casper guy and he couldn't figure out why the purchased version wouldn't work but the trial would.Good luck.