Error Windows could not start ... disk hardware configuration

I have actually solved my problem but I thought I would still post it because I think that it is an easy mistake to make and fairly critical.

I was replacing my laptop hard disk with a larger faster disk.
I made a disk image of my C partition to a USB drive, installed the new disk, booted the Acronis CD and then restored it.
The first time, I restored it to the new disk that I had divided into 2 partitions and the message that I got when I tried to boot was something about "hal.dll" missing.

So I tried again this time letting it restore into one big partition and then I got "windows could not start ... disk hardware configuration".

I created the MBR cd and tried it. no change...
I reinstalled Windows on the new hard disk so I knew that the disk was OK but restore still resulted in the "could not start" message. Getting desperate, I even reread the Acronis documentation.

Then it dawned on me. Since the only partition I had on the old disk was C that was what I had clicked when I created the image. That other "stuff" on disk 1 was not getting dumped. I reinstalled the old disk, created a new image, this time all of Disk 1" and then restored it and now everything is running fine. In retrospect, I should have known better but there are lots of buttons to click and it is easy to click without thinking.

Going back to the documentation, I did not see it mentioned clearly that for the Boot disk, you almost always have to dump the entire disk not just the C partition.
It should be forcefully stated. Maybe even a warning from the program if you try to dump just the partition on the boot disk.

I advise people to double check that in your periodic backup of your boot disk, that you are backing up the disk, not the partition. Otherwise, if your C drive dies, you may not be able to restore a bootable disk from your backup and you won't be able to redo the image creation like I was.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope it may be useful for some people.

John
I tried creating

 

Hi John,

I agree that imaging the entire hard drive, not just the C partition, is not emphasized sufficiently in the documentation. We have to tell people that over and over here on the forum.

The problem arises because TI doesn't backup and restore the MBR for the drive unless the entire drive (all partitions) is selected.

If a new hard drive has been partitioned in the same way as the original disk, just restoring the C partition will usually result in a bootable system. However, unless you partitioned the original drive yourself, you may not know how it was partitioned. Many manufacturers now are creating special partitions and proprietary MBRs to access these partitions on new systems. The only safe way to backup in this case is to backup the entire hard drive.