Restore says successful, but won't boot

I have a drive that is failing a self test so Dell sent me a replacement. I did a full backup of my old drive onto my external USB drive and validated it. I put the new drive in, booted with the acronis disk. I then restored the partition, making it the active partition, along with the MBE. It says it was successful. And, it won't boot. I made the ISO CD and put it in and it won't boot from that disc. HELP!!!

 

Are you saying you can't boot a bootable CD either?

Check the boot device order in your BIOS.

 

Hello slick1ru2,

Did you burn the ISO image to CD correctly? The following links detail how it needs to be done:

http://trb.org/publications/burning_iso.html (for Nero Burning ROM and Roxio Easy CD Creator)

http://iso.snoekonline.com/iso.htm or http://www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm (for other applications)

Regards

 

slick1ru2,

Did you image the small Dell partition in front of the OS drive? Did you just image the old OS partition? What is the boot error message? Have you checked the boot.ini of the restored OS?

If you just imaged the OS and not the Dell partition then it's likely that you have a boot.ini problem.

 

I think that is the problem. I did not copy the small partition. The error says there is a hardware configuration problem and it can't boot from that disc.

Anyway, I went out of town this weekend and just formatted the disc with the Windows XP CD and put everything back on. Its been 2 years so its due (to make Windows work better and it is faster). The funny thing now is that even though I formatted the disc after the failed restore, it now boots as a dual boot with the working configuration of the fresh install and the one that does not work from the failed retrival.

I am not going to try again to get the image restore to work. I have most everything back to the way I had it. The old drive works, it just fails a self test and I have an external drive to put things on and copy onto the new drive.

Thanks for the help. it may come in handy in the future. I don't have a small Dell partition on this new disc so that won't be the problem if I need to do a restore again.