DD hosed my laptop

Simple procedure turned nightmare.

My PC has Vista & XP, I booted to XP, and COPY partition to USB Hard disk. DD rebooted the laptop, resized the USB hard disk, and deleted my Vista partion.

So now I boot & get the message BOOTMNGR is missing, so I use the DD boot disk, and it try to RESTORE the deleted partition, but the system freezes just after it discovers the deleted partition. I'm using build 2160 of DD10

What the heck went wrong and why did it hose my system?

 

On your internal drive, you had a partition for XP and a partition for Vista. You then copied the Vista partition to a USB hard drive. Next, you deleted the Vista partition from the internal drive leaving only the XP partition. Is that correct?

Was XP always the booting partition (the Active partition)?
If you're getting the BOOTMGR missing error when booting the internal drive, the booting files may have been in the Vista partition.

Why did you copy the Vista partition to the USB drive? Are you planning on trying to boot from it?

Which OS was installed first, XP or Vista?

You will most likely need to do a boot repair of XP since Vista is no longer on the computer. Do you have a standard XP or Vista install CD/DVD?

 

I bought a larger drive. The System came with Vista, and I have been happily dual booting for quite some time. But let's get past all that....

I bought a SATA enclosure, and used DD to copy both partitions (the Vista partition is 1, XP is 2) to the USB SATA drive. Then I installed the new drive into the system as the only drive, and now I got boot problems.....I'm going to try copying the boot.ini and ntldr files from my old drive to the new one, but I'm sure there is some other underlying issue with the boot record...

I had things so Vista will boot, but if I choose XP, it goes throught he splash screen with the bars underneath, then to a blue screen with XP logo and freezes (altough the mouse curser responds)....

wacky....