Booting deletes partitions

[winfor666]

Let's call these two office computers John's and Mary's, just for clarification. I have removed the hard drive from John's computer and put it in Mary's as a slave. I then partitioned it to three partitions, because I want to use XXClone to clone Mary's XP system to it. After I put this hard drive back in John's computer, I intend to install Windows 2000 on a different partition (Mary doesn't want Windows 2000). Everything seems to go well, and I use the "Cool Tools" area of XXClone to make it bootable (write MBR, write Boot Sector, write Boot.ini). I have done this before but with only one partition for the entire drive and it worked great. This time, after the cloning finishes, I see the partition has all the files, everything looks great. I remove the drive, put the master jumper back on, and install the drive in John's computer (exactly the same model and hardware configuration-- typical office bulk purchase) and start it up. It goes to a command prompt cursor, nothing else. I put the drive back in Mary's computer to see what gives, and I notice it has reverted to one unformatted partition. I repeat the format, partition, clone process, but time and again, after it goes into John's computer, it reverts to one unformatted partition. I even rebooted Mary's computer after the clone process and the slave drive still has three partitions just as I created. How and why is John's computer deleting the partitions? If XXClone is unable to clone to a multi-partitioned drive, why does it go ahead? I find nothing in the XXClone user guide, so maybe one of you geeks knows something about the voo-doo of partitioning that makes it look great one minute and implode the next.

[Dencandy]

Personally, I have no idea as I have never used XXClone.