HDD swap and no go

[Splash]

Hi help or advise pls would be greatly appreciated

OK swapping / upgrade of HDD for a friend.
Old Celeron 500 on Intel board.

Added a Ram stick, then

copied their 4G old drive (with Drive Image) onto a new 20G Seagate drive. All OK
remove old drive and make new one master OK
system boots and goes into W2K as usual.
system starts loading with the usual b&w screen with progress bar across the bottom - OK
Then - nothing
System restarts the whole boot
Just keeps going around in circles never actually booting or any thing
Drive is recognised and shows the correct size
System counts down the ram memory and so on

I am at a loss!
If i havent given enough detail let me know
Otherwise i would greatly appreciate some advice

cheers

[T-Shirt]

Try reinstaling the old drive, work ok?
make the new drive a slave and install it, still work?
do a fresh install of 2k on the new drive, then make it the master.
with old drive as slave, use norton ghost to transfer the apps/data(I'm not a drive image fan)
possible problem would be bios support for new /large drive
maybe partion settings (fdisk) or change in addresses due to larger drive size
Is this a "branded" computer (ie:compaq, etc.) as their use of a "soft bios" makes upgrades more difficult.

[Splash]

Thanks for the reply
Basically this is what i did
Install ne drive as slave
copy old drive to new (using drive image)
when swaping old drive out and new to master system wouldnt boot
just the cycle around in circles
when posting the other day it occurred to me to check the Ram
It must have been bumped or something in th process
I removed and replaced and Voila!
All OK now
Dont know why
The ram was counting up on boot, etc
anyway this was obviously the problem

thanks again for ur advice though, much appreciated

[T-Shirt]

Yeah, sometimes the simple (obvious) stuff is the problem.
Glad you figured it out!