BleepingComputer.com: XP won't boot anymore after I installed a new harddrive :(

So today I got a new 2TB harddrive and what I did was copying my old C:\ harddrive (590 GB) to the new one using symantec Ghost. It worked out fine, but now when I try to boot my exact copy of the harddrive on the new one, it gives an error aaying that my hardware configuration had changes drastically since the first time, and I have the re-activate it. I can press yes or no to activate it right now, but no matter what I do, it never gets to any activation screen nor windows itself and it loops forever!! I can't get into windows and even in safe mode, the same thing happens. I plugged my old drive out before I booted on the new one (someone told me this is better because there could be conflicts) and I'm pretty sure all the bios boot settings are correct as well. I was running Service Pack 3 btw.

Please help me, it is very appreciated! Thank you in advance!

Okay guys, the situation has changed. I plugged in my old harddrive (which I had unplugged for various reasons) and booted up the new harddrive. This time, somehow, I DID get to Windows and managed to activate it.

However, it has some serious issues. The taskbar is going from the classic Windows XP style to the old style randomly, the system is slow and every time I start I get a couple of errors, like the Generic Host Process for Win32 Error. I think it has to do with the drive letter, but I'm not sure. Let me explain: basically, my old harddrive is the C:\ drive, it's 600 GB, full, which is why I bought the new 2TB harddrive. I formatted this harddrive and had to give it a letter, so it's called R:\. Now I cloned everything on C:\ to the R:\ drive using Symantec Ghost (version 15) and every time I now try to boot from R:\, I get these errors. The system is really unstable and I don't know how I can fix this. Should I change the drive letter to C:\ maybe? Or will that cause a clash between the two harddisks?

I'm out of ideas and need your help badly reinstalling everything I have right now will take an incredibly long time and will be very tedious work, I'm really hoping that I can fix this normally! Any help is greatly appreciated!

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Hi DigiDoc -
Do you now mean that all items are on the External drive and C is now clean, or do you still have a full C drive ?? The below is to show a picture of the HDD's -
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This post has been edited by noknojon: 22 January 2011 - 06:11 PM