2nd OS partition won't boot on cloned drive

Goal: To replace a 40GB Dual OS drive with a larger one (500GB).

Tools: Acronis TrueImage Home 11
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10

Steps: -Made complete backup of entire drive to an external drive.

-Installed new blank drive in a spare EIDE slot.

-Cloned old drive to new. (XP partition was 6.5GB, now is 414GB)
(W2K partition was 30GB, now is 50GB)

-Removed old drive and booted from newly cloned drive (into XP).

-Installed Disk Director for OS selection at boot.

Everything went fine and completed sucessfully without any errors as
far as I can tell. Using OS Selector I can boot into the XP partition
and all seems fine. When trying to boot into the W2K partition though
the OS screen appears and begins the setup-bars crawl along the bottom
of the screen (appears normal at this point) but then after a few seconds
it jumps to a blue screen with the "Inaccessable_boot_device" error. All
I can do at this point is power-down.

I tried the Force Hidden options but no change. Is this fixable? Any
thoughts or suggestions welcomed.

I have also sent this same info to the tech support folks but thought
maybe someone here might have a suggestion as well.

Thanks,
lhh

 

Hello lhh,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post. Then please submit a request for support and mention that you've already contacted Acronis technical support providing the number of your first request # (e.g. [Acronis #123456]) which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter. Attach the report file to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Alexey Bogomolov

 

It would seem I can only create a report from the partition which IS working (XP). How can I create a report in the other partition (W2K) which IS NOT booting?

Or is there info from the working partition which can help?

I'm a bit confused I guess.

Thanks,

lhh

 

On the old drive, were you using OSS to dual-boot or were you using XP's bootmanager?

Was the XP partition hidden from W2K in the previous setup (before OSS)?

 

The old drive (40GB) was managed by Partition Magic 7/Boot Magic 7 and I had hoped at least BM would still work after the cloning. I discovered that was not the case however (I assumed it was because the new drive was too large (500GB)) so I bought Disk Director Suite 10. After installing DD10 I saw it had correctly identified the new partitions so I went ahead and configured OS Selector based on the info from DD10, I again assumed this would overwrite any old BM data in the MBR and all would be fine. BM used the 'hidden' approach for the unselected boot partition.

Once done it did appear to be trying to work since the correct partitions did appear in the OS Selector menu, the XP partition boots and works fine and the W2K partition at least starts to boot but fails (with the 7B STOP screen) before it gets to the desktop.

I have wondered if I should re-install to old drive and try to get it working correctly with DD10 and then try cloning again but I'm nervous about having a problem that would leave the original drive unuseable. I keep hoping that a few tweaks here and there might resolve the problem with the new clone.

Thanks for jumping in,

lhh

 

Could it be because the hard drive is too large for Windows 2000?

What is your current partition layout, OS order, etc.?

If the Win2K partition is at the end of the drive, you could try resizing the XP partition smaller (say 20GB) and them moving the Win2K partition just after it. Leave the rest unallocated for now. This will move Win2K's bootsector a lot closer to the start of the drive. See if Win2K will boot properly.

You might want to take a look at this Microsoft link: Troubleshooting Stop 0x0000007B or "0x4,0,0,0" errors

Does Win2K have an update for using it with very large hard drives? I know XP had an update in SP1 to fix problems with large drives.

If you're going to try OSS with your original drive, make sure to have a good image backup (with True Image or whatever program you use) before you make changes.

 

It would appear your thoughts are right on target. I followed your suggestions and am now able to boot into either OS without a problem! Chalk one (another one) up to MudCrab! This is a big step in the right direction by the looks of things. Thanks so much!

I had already done some reading of the "7B" STOP and had some vague feelings about the drive size being part of the problem but I am much too much of a novice to really understand it all. I found a lenghty tutorial about "Dual Booting" but it was well over my old head. I didn't have trouble making the changes though (used DD10) and I at least understand the basic concept so it all makes sense. Now I'm trying to get W2K online (it's being stubborn about that for some reason) so I can check for updates and improvements that might let me use more of the drive.

My ultimate goal is to migrate to XP and once that is done I can probably delete the W2K partition altogether. I just need it to be working in the meantime as I move all the applications and associated data files to the XP partition and make sure everything is working correctly.

Anyway, many thanks for the suggestions about and apparently, solutions to, my problem!

Thanks also to the Acronis tech support folks who have been on the case as well and have been quick to respond with their support. I don't have their final verdict/solution yet but they have been very responsive to my request for assistance so far.

lhh

 

If you need to, you can create another partition in the unallocated space after the Win2K partition and use it for backups or storage until you get things sorted out.

There may be an update for Win2K to support larger drives, but I suspect that the problem is the Win2K partition/bootsector needing to be close to the beginning of the drive. There may not be a fix for that.

I know that WinME has a problem like this. It won't install on a partition at the end of a 160GB hard drive and that's a lot smaller than what you're using.

 

I am sad to report it looks like I've broken it again. Everything seemed fine at first and the W2K apps seemed to be working but I couldn't get it online (to possibly update,etc.) so I tried to repair the OS with the original OS install disk. This lead to more problems and the system became unstable again and began failing to boot just as before. I tried various things including restoring the partition from the Acronis backup archive, moving the partition to the very beginning of the drive, etc. but nothing has worked (I was hoping that moving the W2K partition to the head of the drive would also allow me to make the XP partition much larger as well and that did work fine for XP but W2K still wasn't booting). Anyway it looks like I'm stuck again.

At this point I think it might be best to start over and could use some suggestions if anyone has the time. As far as I know my original 40GB drive is still fine (haven't put it back in the machine yet) but I am thinking I would like to wipe this new 500GB drive and try to start from scratch. If possible I would like to put the W2K partition at the head of the drive and the XP partition following it (on the original drive they are in the opposite order) but I have seen some folks reporting problems when trying to do this so I'd like some advice about whether I should try to do that or not.

XP has been amazing throughout this whole process. I have moved and resized its partition several times now and it has never failed to boot properly and work perfectly. In general it has been the most reliable and robust Microsoft OS I have ever used by far (and I started with Windows 1.0 or what ever the very first one was called).

Thanks for any suggestions anyone cares to offer,

lhh

 

I wouldn't think there would be a problem with putting Win2K in the first partition. In fact, if I were doing it, that's what I would do --- keep the older OS at the start of the drive since it has an older bootloader. However, I think XP's bootloader will take this over when you install XP. Even so, since Win2K is having so much trouble, having it at the start of the disk would be a good thing to try. When you tried to repair Win2K, it probably reset the bootloader too.

XP SP2 shoudn't have a problem being anywhere on the 500GB drive. If you're installing pre-SP1, then install the SP2 update as soon as possible after installing XP to avoid any corruption issues on the large drive.

What you could try would be to install Win2K on the 500GB drive in a partition at the beginning of the drive (use whatever partition size you need), then install XP in the remaining space or split the remaining space between XP and a Data partition.

Another option (depending on what you use Win2K for), would be to just install XP and run Win2K in Virtual PC 2007 (or another VM program).

 

I still have that arrangement (W2K first, gap, XP) and I just noticed that the first partition was actually larger than 32GB so I'm shrinking it back to about 31GB and trying one more time to restore the W2K system. I read last night that W2K may have problems with drives/partitions larger 32GB so maybe I'll get lucky. I want to update W2K if I can ever get it working again and I see they're up to SP4 now. I don't think my system was ever updated at all so that might help. I looked and looked for info on drive/partition size limits for W2K and all the W2K updates but never found a specific answer. The release notes and list of update fixes is quite large and difficult to search on the Microsoft website so I finally gave up. Amazing to see all the issues they have to deal with, quite overwhelming.

XP is continually updated and is at SP2 now so maybe that explains why it has been so resilient. I have had two lockups now when TrueImage 11 is trying to synchronize after modifying a partition size so that's something new and troubling I guess. I think I'll start a new topic about it in case other folks have had it happen.

I'm also trying to install another data drive and even that has generated a strange situation so I'll post seperately for that too.

And I didn't know about the virtual approach to this---have to check into that. If that worked I might be able to dedicate this whole drive to XP and just run W2K when necessary until I'm fully migrated. Thanks for that tip.

lhh

 

Resizing the W2K partition helped but only slightly. When booting it now gets to the W2K splash screen but within a second or two it's blue-screened with the 7B error message again. Close but no cigar.

I also tried restoring the original image of this partition into the newly resized partition (just slightly larger than the min required) but the results were the same as above.

And I thought this was going to be so easy!!!

lhh

 

Through the mist and fog vague shapes of understanding form and disappear again.........

Guess I'm still at it with this problem. I've made some progress but there is still trouble with the W2K (SP4) partition. I'll describe what I have done to this point in hopes I might be fairly close to a solution. I can't believe how may times I have stopped and started this machine in the past few days----I haven't re-booted this much since I lived in a little Alaskan cabin and had to go out back to the potty

I tried and tried to move and resize both the XP and W2K partitions but could never find a way to move the W2K partition which was in the second position up to the head of the drive. This would have allowed me to make W2K start at 0 and have a properly small partition and then let XP use the rest of the drive. Just couldn't find a way to do it though and no matter what I did XP would ALWAYS boot and W2K would NEVER boot.

Anyway I decided to start anew and cloned the original 40GB drive "as is" to a new 500GB drive and this clone worked fine. Once it was up and running I installed the lastest builds of TI 11.0(8,027) and DDS 10.0 (2,160) and made sure OSS could select and boot either OS from the OSS boot screen and this seemed to be working perfectly at this point. The partitions were still in the opposite order I really wanted but both XP and W2K booted and worked fine. The only 'slightly' odd things I noticed were that W2K always listed the XP partition as Drive G: (whether forced hidden was used or not) and that my old partition/boot tools from Powerquest (PartitionMagic 7 and BootMagic 7) were still still listed as installed programs in the XP partition but neither would work or could be uninstalled as XP would report they were "not designed for this operating system" or "no .dll found". Since everything seemed to be working so well I hoped this was not a major problem and went ahead with the following steps to see if I could take a working dual-OS drive and re-arrange things as I wanted them. I also installed and partitioned a second 500GB drive to use as a storage medium for all the archives, etc. I made this a logical partition of 120GB so it would still be valid for W2K which I have read has a 128GB limit (hard info to find, especially in regards to the SPx updates). I disconnected the LAN and external USB drives and disabled all Symantec apps (Internet Security) just to keep things simple and hopefully improve the odds this would work.

So this is what I did:

1- Make full C: backup archive to D:

2- Delete the W2K partition on C:

3- Move the XP partition in 50GB and extend to end of drive

4- Restore W2K from the archive to the beginning of C: and extend
to 31.5GB

Between each step I checked for proper booting and OSS operation and never had any problems. Also every operation I performed completed successfully so I thought this might actually work this time. Alas though, I still have no luck booting W2K and get the same 7B error message.

There does seem to be some slight improvement though because W2K gets a little further than before and now displays the Windows 2000 spalsh screen and begins the progress 'crawl' for a second or so before the blue screen appears so it would seem it is almost there. If I can fix this as it is I'll have the partitions in the right order and XP can now have lots of room so I'm hoping someone might have just another suggestion or two and I'll be home at last.

Can't say enough how much I have appreciated the help and suggestions I have recieved here so far. Hope I can return the favor someday.

lhh

 

To me it sounds like a drive letter change problem. Anytime you bootup to the splashscreen and it hangs there or reboots, its a sign that the registry cannot locate the next starup files because it's looking for them in the wrong drive.

All NT based OS systems (vista not affected) are prone to have there drive letters changed during restoration (especially in multi partition/hard drive configurations. To me the reasons for this to happen are too many to troubleshoot (the original drive sees the new harddrive/starting the computer with cloned/original drive installed/installing larger partition to smaller partition/etc).

In my case I found out that the easiest way to fix this problem, is to fix it post restore (instead of trying to retrace or figure out what caused it in the first place). If you get the new hard drive to start the bootup sequence but not complete it, that means you have a drive letter change or boot.ini file problem.

When I had this problem on windows xp, changing the drive letter back to it's original label suceeded in getting the hard drive to bootup. I use the program "paragon justboot corrector" side to side with true image. With it I can change drive letters to whatever I want on any operating on the hard drive. In my expierence as long as you know how to change drive letters you can restore most true image backups.

My recommendation is verify your drive letters, I think that where your problem is. Thats what I would check first then the boot.ini files.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=174958

 

I'm tempted to try this and it has been mentioned before but I wonder if a neophyte like myself could cause more harm than good? I would assume all OS partitions should be labeled C: and OSS will hide the inactive one at boot time. Am I on the right track or is it much more complicated than that? From reading the topic link (as best I could) it sounds like I may be underestimating the way this all works a bit (not uncommon for me!). Or is the operation of the boot corrector fairly self-explanatory and user friendly?

At this point I am still running on my cloned drive so I'm not too worried about what I try, just want to do it right so things don't go wacky all of a sudden later.

lhh

 

I had this same problem using a dual boot configuration. At one point I could boot into my Vista system, But, could not boot into My XP system. What You need to do is use EasyBCD 1.7 which You can get here--->
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1........Install it and cartefully follow the instructions on how to use it.
jakson

 

Oh boy, I took a look at the Paragon Justboot Corrector and decided to d/l the demo just to take a look and I can't get it to make a bootable CD using its own extractor/burner and even burning the extracted .iso file just resulted in a verified burn but no bootable media. And their website is completely devoid of any support, faq, etc.

I would assume the Neosmart product is designed to do similar things so maybe I'll give that a try.

Still wondering why the Paragon JBC is giving me so much trouble though?

lhh

 

Since the Paragon .iso file bured without errors but would not boot (OSS takes over even if the CD drive is the first boot device?) I tried to take a look at the data on the CD and was given an option to open it in an 'emulated drive'. I did this and the CD seems to contain valid data (and a user manual which I am reading through) but now I seem to have a permanent emulated (G drive!

Anybody know how to get rid of an emualted drive in XP? Removed the CD and even rebooted but it's still there. Normally G: is my external USB drive and many programs have file paths requiring it to be G:.

Thanks,

lhh

 

You mention that the OSS takes over during booting up even when the cd is chosen as the first boot up device. By OSS you mean the operating system? I've used the paragon demo cd on different computers and it's always booted up the computer except one time when I had a bad motherboard. The demo will not "save" any changes to your hard drive, it will only let you analyze your hard drive.

Can you get your windows xp installation cd to bootup the computer? If you can, the paragon bootup cd is probably corrupt or not burned properly. I hope you can get it to bootup, the demo will show you the layout of your hard drive operating systems and there registry drive letters. The first time I used it, I saw the problem right away, my c: drive was labeled something else. Maybe you will notice something out of place on your hard drive.

 

By OSS I meant the OS Selector which is a part of Disk Director Suite. It lets you select the OS you want to boot at power-up. Don't know why yet but my burned Paragon .iso CD doesn't appear to be bootable. I'll try again. I did finally get it to try to boot from the CD but it wasn't viable for booting.

BTW I did find out that 'emulated drive' is a new addition that came with Easy Media Creator 10 which I just installed recently. I found the method of deleting emulated drives in their help files.

lhh

 

For what it's worth at this point I did get the JustBoot Boot Corrector correctly installed on a CD (used another PC with a better burner) and I looked around with it to see what I could learn. I could see there was some drive letter confusion so I purchased the full JBC version and made some drive letter changes. Unfortunately it didn't fix the problem. I see there are a number of other tools available but was not confident I know enough about all this to try to use them.

I'm starting to think the real problem may be related to swapping the positions of the partitions. The "as is" cloned drive worked fine (both XP and W2K would boot and run correctly) and it was only after I re-arranged the order of the partitions that this whole problem started. Funny how tolerant XP is though since it continues to work fine (using it right now) no matter where I put it on the drive, what size I made it or whatever.

lhh

 

I too think that the problem is related to swapping the partitions. Have you tried this?

Using DD from the CD, clear the drive (delete all partitions).
Make a small NTFS Primary partition at the start of the disk (200MB or so).
Then make the Win2K partition (so it's still 2nd).
Finally, make the Primary NTFS partition for XP using the remainder of the disk.

Now restore XP to the 3rd partition and then restore Win2K to the 2nd partition (do it in that order to force Win2K back into the 2nd partition table slot -- I'm assuming TI 11 shuffles them around like 10 does).

Install OSS (you can use the small Primary partition if you want -- do a custom install).

See if Win2K will boot and work properly.

If that doesn't work, then don't restore XP. Follow the instructions above and just restore Win2K to the 2nd partition (leave the 3rd partition empty).

Install OSS and see if Win2K boots and works properly.

 

Thanks for more suggestions, MudCrab. Right now I am following a rather complex proceedure provide by the tech support folks but it appears to have just failed after about a days worth of work, off and on.

Since my only real goal is to migrate everything I have to XP I'm thinking about just biting the bullet and making this a single partition drive with XP and just reinstalling everything as fast as I can. I would have loved to keep both OS's going throughout but at this point I think I'm wasting too much time and I may as well just move on.

I am a puzzle solver though and I just want to know why something doesn't work and usually keep futzing with it until it either works or I have broken it beyond any possible hope for repair. In this case though my lack of detailed knowledge about how the computer actually operates at this level makes me think maybe I should throw in the towel on this one.

I'm also a little annoyed that I have spent about $100 of software that claimed the capability to do all this but I must still admit I am a bit over my head here too. Still somehow it doesn't seem this stuff should really be all that difficult to do. I'm a EE and have written quite a bit of assembly code for embedded systems over the years and could probably understand it if I spent enough time researching the details. Guess I've become a little impatient though since I really have to get this system working so I can continue to do the things I DO know how to do.

Many thanks (to all) though for the helpful suggestions along the way.

lhh