Step by Step Restore and “Windows will not start because of Computer Disk Hardware"

I have finally recovered from a catastrophic hard disk failure using ATI 9. This was a fairly emotional ride, where I found myself cursing ATI, but have begrudgingly come around to support it.

This post may help some folks. Keep in mind that while I am pretty technical (started with DOS), its not really what I do for a living.

As background, this is for Dell 4600 running Windows XP SP2 and 160GB SATA drive. Dell installed the new drive when mine died.

Step By Step for ATI 9 that I found helpful.
I went nuts trying to do the ATI restore. I could not find any HELP for my problem – restore an image from an external drive to a newly installed formatted hard drive. I came across this post and it helped a lot. https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=162555&highlight=step

If you've already installed the TI software, be sure to make the bootable Rescue CD. You will need this to Restore/Recover your Backup Image in case your HD will not boot nor cannot be fixed. If you did not create the disk, you might be able to install ATI on a similar machine and create a Rescue Disk (see boot.ini issue below if you go this route).

1.) Install the new hard drive
2.) Boot with the ATI Rescue CD. I selected “Full” version as it includes USB drivers.
3.) From the Rescue CD's ATI menu choose "Add New Disk". This will partition it so that ATI will recognize it. Follow the steps till complete.
4.) Back at the main ATI menu choose "Recovery"
5.) Follow the prompts to choose your Archive (where you have the Backup) and Destination drives
6.) This is the odd part. ATI will see that the new drive has a partition, which was created in step 3 but will ask to delete it in order to proceed. You have to agree to this.
7.) Follow the rest of the prompts to perform the Recovery.

I may have left out some steps but that should get you on your way.

I found recovery of 160 GB drive from a Maxtor USB 2 external drive took 12 hours.


"Windows will not start…” message and boot.ini
After a successful ATI 9 restore of Windows XP disk, I got the message "Windows will not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from selected boot disk". As a reminder, I could restore using ATI, but could not boot with the new hard drive..

I kept having this problem, and continued search via Google and came up with an Microsoft document on the topic. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314477 which described how to modify the boot.ini file. I followed their instructures and lo and behold, the system booted, and I was back to my pre-disk-crash environment. I had to then make few edits to the Boot.ini file from within Windows (covered in the same MS tech note).

I am not really sure why this happened, but I suspect its because the ATI Rescue CD I used did not come from PC I was trying to restore. This might have created a Boot.ini file with a different Windows OS name than was in my original configuration.

Again, I don’t claim to be an expert at this, but felt some of this might help folks who have similar problems.

 

Re: Step by Step Restore and “Windows will not start because of Computer Disk Hardwar

The Rescue CD is PC independent. It sounds like you didn't do a full disk restore that included the MBR originally. For future reference here is an excellent article to correct problems you ran into Repairing Windows XP in Eight Commands.