No boot with new hard drive

I'm replacing a laptop hard drive. Old drive was 7G; new drive 20G. I saved an image of the old drive to a network computer, replaced the laptop drive and restored the image to the new drive. I chose "active" partition. True Image reported success at restoring the image, but the new hard drive will not boot.

OS is WinXP Pro.

I'm wondering if I should have restored the image to a primary partition instead of active? I tried to run everything over again to try that, but the second shot through, the primary option was grayed out.

What steps should I follow to get a bootable disk?

It seemed like it should have been fairly straightforward--save an image from the old drive; restore it to the new drive... magic. Ha! In my dreams.

Appreciate suggestions from anyone who has had success with a similar situation.

Thank you.

 

Hello waitek,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We are really sorry for the inconveniences.

The scenario you have described should have worked. Please tell whether you have created the image of the full disk and indicated the full disk durng the restoration (not single partition)? Also please describe what happens now when you turn on the computer? Where it stops booting and what screen do you see?

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

I thought the old hard drive had one partition, although True Image displayed two choices: one looked like the main hard drive; the other was small and said something about hibernation files. I remember turning off the laptop and restarting it, hoping to get rid of the hibernation choice, but it stayed there. I selected backing up only the large partition that was marked as primary and active.

ADDED NOTE: I just reinstalled the old hard drive and it does have two partitions, according to True Image. The largest one is lettered C: and is marked as primary and active (FAT32 -- LBA). The second one is a FAT16 primary partition with about 275 mb in it. The type is specified as FS:FAT16 0xxa0 (laptop hibernation). I'm going to make another disk image with the whole thing.

The error I'm getting is a black screen with white text:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration.... etc.

I have checked the set-up setting, and the computer is set to boot from the hard drive--no options are given as to letter choice for drives. Moot point anyway, because there's just the one hard drive. The new hard drive is set as master.

Should I have included the "hibernation" part of the old hard drive when making the backup image?

 

Hello waitek,

Please create the image of the whole disk (you may do it by checking the box near the "Disk" rather than near the separate partitions). After that please restore the image and choose the whole disk once again.

If the problem persists please plug in your old drive, create Acronis Report (please see https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317) and send to support@acronis.com along with the link to this thread.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Aha. New drive is booting. One last issue, however. The image was so good that the new 20G hard drive shows only 9G as its size when I check properties. (The old hard drive was actually 9G instead of the 7G I posted earlier.)

So how do I access the missing 11G? I didn't notice any options during the image transfer--and True Image did report an 18+G hard drive as the new drive.

Thank you for your help.

 

Still wondering why only 9G is showing up for a new 20G hard drive after copying the disk image onto it. How would I use True Image to fix this or is there something else I can do?

WinXP pro OS.

 

Hi, waitek

Try:- My Computer>right click>Manage>Left click>Disk Management>Left cilck>and should see you have free space. [the missing GB's]

Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Hello waitek,

Acronis True Image does allow you to resize partitions when you restore the image. Now you may create the new partition using the unallocated space. Or you may expand you current partition using some partitioning tool such as Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/).

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Thank you for the answers!