Plea re Vista Clone / winload.exe problem

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by JWD, Oct 7, 2007.

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  1. JWD

    JWD Registered Member

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    Hi, I know there are already a lot of posts on here surrounding this problem and believe me I have looked at them, tried to understand them and implement the various recommendations - except those re offsets and resizing which I don't really understand!

    Anyway, I have Vista Business (silly me you might say!) and it is running my HomeSeer home automation, home website, TV recording all that sort of stuff.

    Now I want to be nice and secure with the system that has taken hours to create and I chose Acronis True Image Home 10.0 back in May 2007 to do this (On XP previously I was a Ghost user). I planned to have a grandfather/father/son setup with 3x 80Gb SATA system disks in caddies being cloned one to another every few months (as well as other separate data backups in between).

    So despite being on Build 4942 now and despite having low-level formatted the clone-receiving disk I am still getting the winload.exe missing or corrupt error. What makes it worse is that I can't even do a repair as when I boot the Vista CD and select repair my new SATA disk does not appear as an option for repair (nor do any others but my old/current system is not actually in place at this point as I don't want to trash it by mistake!). However the disk is there and recognised by the BIOS and the Vista CD OS.

    My question of anyone who might understand what is going on is how might I overcome this problem? Back in May I am pretty sure I actually achieved the required result once using the trial download TI10 version but since then I have bought the product and updated it to 4942. The only problem I think I had then was the annoying phone call to Microsoft to convince them I wasn't breaking the license agreement (which I wasn't and I'm not seeking to do now!).

    Any help much appreciated - and apologies if I have missed the golden bullet on the forum that already answers this problem.

    John Downe
     
  2. mustang

    mustang Developer

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    You should be able to do the repair with the Vista DVD. You will need to load the drivers for your SATA controler. With Vista this can be done on the fly. Choose the Repair option and look for the Load Driver choice. After you provide the proper driver for your SATA controller, your hard drives will appear. Then you should be able to do the startup repair.
     
  3. JWD

    JWD Registered Member

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    Thanks Mustang, I did make an attempt at that but found no SATA drivers on the CD that came with my motherboard - I'll go the manufacturer's website and see if there is something there and report back except that ASUS website downloads section is under maintenance - please try later!
     
    Last edited: Oct 7, 2007
  4. JWD

    JWD Registered Member

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    OK, I actually found the drivers on the motherboard CD and they were the same/similar to the ones I also found on the web.
    However, the Vista DVD OS still cannot see the image to repair - ie the disk I cloned - aparently successfully from one SATA disk to another of the same size.
    So I haven't made any progress - anyone have any other suggestions?
    Many thanks

    John Downe
     
  5. mustang

    mustang Developer

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    You're going to have to sort out the driver issue. If you add the proper driver for your controller, it should work. You wouldn't even be able to install Vista from scratch without adding the proper driver during the install. What controller is on your motherboard?

    You may have some luck using BartPE with a universal driver pack. Then you could remotely edit the BCD file or use Jeremy Otten's BartPE plugin to make the repair. The first step would be to make a BartPE CD with the driver pack and see if your hard drives are seen.
     
  6. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello JWD,

    Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

    Please notice that the problem that sometimes caused needing to repair Vista partitions after clone/restore is fixed in Acronis True Image 11 Home. We recommend you the following workaround: create an image of the partition in question, then restore it using the free trial version of Acronis True Image 11 Home. After that, all further clones/restores using Acronis True Image 10.0 should not cause problems.

    If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

    Thank you.
    --
    Marat Setdikov
     
  7. JWD

    JWD Registered Member

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    Marat, thanks - OK I did that - ie created an image backup wth TI10, then restored it to another destination drive using Trial TI11. The new drive now works - great! I never tried this way with TI10 though so it may well have worked with that too.
    So then I tried cloning the newly created copy to another drive and I get the self-same message re winload.exe. I get this with both Automatic and Manual Clone options. So I'm afraid this hasn't resolved the problem - although I do now have another copy of my system which is a better place to be. Given that this route requires roughly twice the time of a simple clone whilst my system is offline it is far from ideal.

    I have also opened a support incident - which has suggested using "Manual" mode for cloning and creating a Bootable Media (awaiting some new CDRs for this)

    John Downe
     
  8. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello JWD,

    If the suggested workaround doesn't solve the problem, please collect and send the following information (if you haven't done so yet):

    Please create Acronis Report, Windows system information and Linux system information (sysinfo.txt) as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

    Could you please let us know your Acronis request number which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? We will find out how the investigation of your issue is going.

    Thank you.
    --
    Marat Setdikov
     
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