XP Won't Boot

I bought a new 250GB hard drive for my Gateway CX2724 laptop. I installed it. Put the old HD in my USB enclosure. Connected that to the laptop. Started it up from my Ghost CD and instructed it to copy everything from the old HD (100GB) to the new one (250GB). So everything went well, all the files are there, etc. Verified in Knoppix. However, it won't boot. It displays and loops "Press F11 to Start Recovery 2....1". This repeats infinitely. Any ideas as to what could be wrong. Of course Gateway decided not to include any recovery discs. I created the recovery disks, but I'd prefer to fix the problem. And of course hitting F11 doesn't do anything.

Oh yeah, neither the new nor old HD boots the system now. I don't have a ton of stuff on there that's not backed up elsewhere. Most of my data is stored on my server. There are only a few iTunes downloads and one school assignment that I need to pull off. However, I just spent three hours cloning the HD.

Anyone know which partition should be marked as boot: recovery or XP? I want to run fixboot and fixmbr, but that requires a SATA compatible XP disc so I can get into the recovery console.

My thoughts: Corrupt Recovery Partition stopping XP from booting. OS: XP Tablet PC Edition (that's pro). HD: 250 GB SATA 2.5in

I should have a bart pe lying around here somewhere. I might try that to see if I can get anything working. I do have an image that I can try to restore, however, I anticipate the same problem since Ghost created that image and this problem.

I tried to get the recovery console up, but it said I had no hard drives installed in my computer. This happened with either disc in the computer. When they were in the enclosure, they showed up just fine.

 

first try booting with gparted and flagging the XP partition as the boot partition and removing the boot flag from the recovery partition (if applicable)

if that doesn't work, use nLite to slipstream and XP disc with your drivers, do a fixmbr and chkdsk, I wouldn't even worry about the recovery partition - they're pretty useless for any power user, so I'd just delete it

 

Yeah, everything was set right. Checked that with gparted before I posted. Anyhow, I gave up and restored the ghost image I created when I got the computer. It removed the recovery partition (didn't realize it would do that) and everything is working fine now. I use a domain and roaming profiles so my profile was pulled from the server again.