One for the IT specialists amongst us.

My laptop hard drive is about to die so i bought another drive and a USB enclosure and set about trying to use Clonezilla and then Macrium Reflect to clone the drives in the hope that i could just swap them over as all the websites said i should be able to do. Unfortunately neither has worked.

I've tried booting from the usb (new drive) with it in the laptop and also whilst it is connected by usb without success.

I feel like I'm so close, but dont know what bit I'm missing. Does this make any sense to anyone else? Have you done the same and can you help?

Please dont let me lose Locostbuilders for ever!

Help!

PS. I have a Windows XP key sticker on the laptop but no software disc and i can't burn discs. Just to makes things harder.

The partition has to be bootable and set as active, just install the drive in the laptop, on restart go into the bios settings and make sure it is detected in bios.

[Edited on 14/11/13 by britishtrident]

With the new drive in the USB enclosure. Can the laptop "see" the new drive? Is the new drive set up as the slave? Does the new drive need formatting?

I've had to put the new drive in the laptop now as the old one is totally knackered now.

I've loaded Ubuntu onto a USB stick and via BIOS I am trying to get the laptop to boot from it. It doesn't want to know. I just get the "non system disk error" message. Ive followed the instructions on the Ubuntu website correctly I think.

I'm going to have to leave it for tonight now. If anyone has any ideas about the new issue, i would be really grateful if you could post here and I'll take a look tomorrow.

Many thanks.

have you opened the BIOS screen to see the startup and boot drive settings?

If you can see the drive in the bios then it sounds like you may have no master boot record.

If you can boot into xp, you will need to do an fdisk /MBR on the new drive...

[Edited on 15/11/13 by stevebubs]

If you can boot with windows xp install there will be options to format and partition etc.

Thanks for all the replies guys. They got me going in the right direction and i'm now typing this on the laptop with a new hard drive and loving Ubuntu. Getting used to how fast things are now!