I have a laptop that was originally preinstalled with XP. I bought windows
vista home premium upgrade, and I have been using vista without any problems
for the past few months.

Unfortunately, it appears that my hard drive is starting to failue (at least
that is what vista is telling me), and so, I am trying to figure out how to
do that.

I tried using norton ghost version 12.0 (vista compatible). What I did is I
bought a new hard drive and a usb adapter. I used Norton ghost to copy the C
drive over to this drive (MBR and everything). I then took out my old C
Drive and then put in my new hard drive.

Unfortunately, while the new hard drive appears to boot initially, I get to
the welcome screen, then a message saying "preparing your desktop", and then
a blank blue screen w/o any error messages. Okay, what's weird is if I plug
in my old C drive via tje USB ADAPTER, then vista will see that USB drive and
boot normally. I can't count on this as a solution this drive appears to be
failing.

So, I went back to the drawing board. My laptop has two hard drives. I
took out my old D drive, and placed in my new hard drive. I then asked Vista
to do a clean install on this hard drive. Everything appears to go well.
Okay I swap out my old failing c Drive and place in my newly installed vista
installation. Now it says Boot manager is missing.

If I plop in my old C drive all my problems go away.

It seems that vista is married to this drive, and there does not appear to
be a way to unmarry it.

any ideas, as my hard drive i'm sure will die soon.

thanks

thanks for the reply, were you responding to the ghost issue. if that's the case. norton ghost 12.0 has a MBR check, which I believe I checked (i've done it a few times now). Also, if i place the hard drive that I ghosted into the C slot. It DOES boot. it even goes through the whole process of the windows welcome screen, and then I get a message "preparing your desktop" and then I get a blank blue screen. This is not the BSOD, this is a blue screen within the vista GUI but there is absolutely nothing on it.

Regarding the windows clean install, i'm assuming that the windows for some reason is not installing a boot manager on my 2nd hard drive. maybe it's because it wants the C drive to be the booting device forever (piracy issues)

I'll play around with my laptop some more.

hopefully, someone can help. thanks

Doh! My laptop did not come with a floppy. It's a good idea though. I'll have to think of something creative.

Does anyone know the official microsoft procedure for doing this?

I can't seem to find it on their web site. You would think hard drive failure and transferring windows is something they should have anticipated. Maybe i'm missing something obvious (wouldn't be the 1st time).

Thanks

Either the mbr wasn't copied, or the bios is looking for the wrong drive. Once you put new drive into Laptop, checkl the bios to be certain it is recognizing the new drive and trying to boot to it.