After restore to new hard disk, XP New Hardware Wizard complains

When the 80 GB hard disk in my Dell 8600 Inspiron laptop started causing problems, Dell sent me a new blank hard drive.

I used Acronis TI 10 to create an image of my old hard drive onto an external hard drive, and created the Acronis boot CD.

I validated the image, which had a 74.5 GB NTFS partition, and a tiny FAT partition.

Next, I installed WinXP Pro SP 2 on the new disk and created one 76316 MB partition.

I restored the NTFS partition, adjusting the size to 74.53 GB. I did not restore the MBR, or the FAT partition.

The restore worked fine, except... now at startup, a window opens "Hardware Installation. The software you are installing for this hardware: Disk drive has not passed Windows Logo testing to verifiy its compatibility with Windows XP. Continuing your installation of this software may impair or destabilize the correct operation of your system immediately or in the future. Microsoft strongly recommends that you stop this installation and contact the hardware vendor for software that has passed the Windows Logo testing.

At this point I choose "STOP installation."

Then I get 2 more similar messages, referring to "Toshiba MK8032GAX" and "Generic volume." After choosing stop installation for these, this message appears in the tray: "Your new hardware might not work properly."

So Win XP seems to be confused about the new hard drive and volume, but after I get past these messages, everything works fine.

Before posting, I read many threads in the forum, but couldn't figure out where my restore went wrong.

Did I restore correctly? I only restored the NTFS partition, not the small FAT partition or the MBR. How can I get Win XP Pro to see that the hard disk and the volume are okay?

Thanks in advance for any help,
JillV

 

jillv,

Did this WinXP run properly without errors? Is it only the restored OS that has errors?

I have a Dell 8600 Inspiron laptop. Nice computer. Mine came with 3 partitions (I think). A Dell Diagnostic partition, the OS and a Dell Restore partition. I'm not positive about the third partition. I always delete that partition anyway.

 

Brian K,

Yes, only the restored OS shows these errors at startup (all relating to the new hard disk and new volume).

JillV

 

jillv: I'm not certain about the adequacy of the steps that you have taken, but I will tell you a more direct way that is guaranteed to work. I have done it a few times now. I have found that you will have zero problems if you backup and restore the entire disk, not separate partitions. Do not try to shed any partitions durig your restoration. If you put your original hard drive back into your laptop, here is what I recommend. Boot up from your rescue CD and make a disk image of your entire original hard drive to your external hard drive. Now shut down and put your new Dell hard drive into the laptop. Boot again from the Rescue CD and RESTORE your disk image from the external drive back to your new internal DELL hard drive. Make sure you check-mark the entire disk for restoration, not just the NTFS partition. When it is done, shut it all down and remove the Rescue disk and unplug the external drive. You can now boot up just like the day that you made the original image. Good luck.

 

JillV,

I'd be inclined to start again with a blank HD. Do you have partitioning software to delete all partitions on that HD? You don't need to install an OS prior to a restore. Just restore to an empty HD. I assume you have both partitions in your image. The small FAT diagnostic partition and the OS. Restore both, along with the MBR. It should work.

Any questions?

 

Brian and Glowboy.

Right - I'll restore the entire disk.

Since restoring the one partition kinda worked, I'm confident that restoring everything will do the trick.

Thanks for your help.
It's good to hear from someone who's done this before.

JillV

 

Let us know about the good news.

 

jillV: You do not have to use any partitioning software or restore to a blank hard drive. True image will restore a disk image blindly on top of any other hard drive. It will re-image the target disk entirely and does not care about anything that is present there. Just be sure that when you make the backup and also when you restore the backup that you select the full disk image by checking the Major checkbox by the selected disk. Do not bother checkmarking the separate partitions becuase when you checkmark the selected disk, all paritions on that disk will also get a check mark automatically without you having to. Hope this helps you. A full disk image restore with a replacement drive is really candy and no risk at all.

 

glowboy,

Thanks. I didn't know that. I don't use whole disk images on my computers.

 

Brian: I use this product at work for disk recovery after a HDD failure on a critical system. I don't use it for file recovery or anything. I exclusively use it for its full disk image restore capability. It is a really great product. If file backups were done, you can restore separate files. If you made a full disk image, you can easliy restore the full disk image. Most people get into trouble when they start to restore separate partitions and not the entire disk image. you can restore partitions just fine, but certain rules have to be followed or you can get into trouble. One neat thing about this product is that you can use it to temporarily "mount" your backup disk image and drill into it with Windows explorer just like it was one of you regular drives and then read/write to it if you desire. you can tell I'm a fan.

 

glowboy,

I agree. Image/Restore software is wonderful. What a time saver in the event of a software problem or HD failure. My needs are different to your needs (home user). I just image the OS partition in my computers. I backup data partitions as data, with native format.

My main computer has two WinXP partitions and I use the second one for software testing. It's easy to just restore it to its basic state when I've finished the test. Out of interest, I had 15 installations of WinXP on this computer, all booting independently. Just to convince me that it can be done. Their life span was about 10 minutes before I reverted to a more conventional setup.

 

I think this is a very simply fix. Windows has detected the new hard drive and is just wanting to load new drivers for it. This is expected.

The problem is that the drivers that it has have not passed Windows Logo verification. This is VERY common.

Just click okay and let it install the new drivers. I would not be concerned at all. Once it has the new drivers it won't bring up the window any more and won't say that there 'may' be a problem with your new hardware.