TIH11 keeps killing my boot drive.

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by MarkJohnson, Jan 29, 2009.

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  1. MarkJohnson

    MarkJohnson Registered Member

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    I just got my Areca raid controller back from rma for replacing a choke I broke off the card. I reconnect the old drives and turn on the computer and it seems to boot ok up to the logon password page, I enter my password and instead of a welcome page I get a,"Setup is preparing deskyop" message. After about 5 minutes or more it makes it to the desktop, but has nothing on the screen. Just a cursor on a light blue screen. It the color like when you disable the fancy graphics in control panel and you get a windows 98 looking theme loaded, but no windows logo start button, no taskbar, no clock, no desktop icons, not even a right click short cut menu. just a blank blue screen. I press the power button and it shuts off quickly.

    I figure it's a corrupt file or something and decide to use ATI11 to clone the image from the ICH10 raid to the areca raid with no issues.

    A week or so later I decide to install Windows 7 on the drive, but no drivers for windows for the areca raid controller. I boot into Vista on the ICH10 raid 0 drives and clone my Vista ult x64 to the areca controller without a hitch(I pre-formatted it before trying to install Windows 7). I run some more test and check the drives for errors, etc. all is fine.

    I install windows 7 on the ICH10 without a hitch. I setup a few programs and half of them work from lack of driver support. I swicth back to my Areca controller in bios and when I boot into vista I get to the password and when I enter it I get an error saying no drive permissions? It says it's drive I:. I click continue and sure enough I get the,"Setup is preparing your desktop" again and I get the blank screen with cursor as well.

    I try running the rescue CD off the Vista Ult x64 disk with no luck. I lost my image as I installed Windows 7 over it. I can't access the drive within Windows 7 because of no driver support, to see if I had a backup image (I'm pretty sure I don't though)

    Not sure why I lost the drive other than Acronis tied it to my ICH10 drive somehow and now it won't work because I formatted it and installed Windows 7. That's the only common denominator between the two crashes.

    Anyone experience anything like this? Or any suggestions on a fix?
    -=Mark=-
     
    Last edited: Jan 29, 2009
  2. MarkJohnson

    MarkJohnson Registered Member

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    I tried to use restore from Vista DVD and it doesn't list anything. It is blank. I tried repair and it says nothing is wrong, but it seems to just check the boot sectors or something as it takes less than a second to report nothing is wrong so it isn't looking very hard.

    I'm open to any suggestions
    -=Mark=-
     
  3. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    When Vista gets stuck on the Preparing desktop... screen and then ends up on a blank screen or with an error message, it usually means the drive letter assignments are incorrect. If that's the case, the fix is fairly simple.

    Once you get the blank screen or the error message, do the following (it's okay to leave the error message on the screen):
    1. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del.
    2. Start the Task Manager.
    3. Run Explorer (File menu, New Task (Run...), explorer).
    4. Once Explorer is running, you can see what drive letters are assigned to your partitions. For example: Your Vista partition should be C:, but is assigned as E:. C: is assigned to a different partition.
    5. From Task Manager, run Regedit.
    6. Browse to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
    7. This will list your drive letter assignments (shown as \DosDevices\C:, for example).
    8. Rename the drive letter keys to be correct. For this example, we need to swap E: and C:.
    9. Rename the C: key to \DosDevices\E:
    10. Rename the incorrect E: key to \DosDevices\C:
    11. Exit Regedit and reboot the computer.
    This is just an example. Your drive letters will probably be different. However, the Windows partition is usually assigned the C: drive letter. Other drive letters may also be incorrect. They can be fixed using this method or you can fix them using Disk Management after booting into Vista.
     
  4. MarkJohnson

    MarkJohnson Registered Member

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    I got all the way to step 5, but regedit won't run. Says it doesn't exist on drive D:

    I even tried running computer management and got the same error message.

    in fact, any program I try to run says it doesn't exist and all my shortcuts on the desktop are greyed out.

    should I be in safe mode doing this?

    also, I just retried while typing this message and after I startup explorer my taskbar reports a ballon message with,"Your User Profile Was Not Loaded Properly and says I've been assigned a temporary profile. etc."

    yeah, the error I get when running regedit (or anything) is,"D:\Windows\regedit.exe The specified path does not exist"

    my computer shows my boot drive as D: and I can navigate to d:\windows\regedit and run it from there with the same error. I even run as administrator with same error message.

    Not sure what else to try next.

    Thanks for your help
    -=Mark=-
     
  5. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    You can boot from the Vista DVD, start the Repair Mode, start the Command Prompt and then start regedit from the prompt.

    From there, you can Load the Hive from the Vista partition and make the necessary changes. You can find similar instructions in this post. In your case, you just want to change D: to C: (I'm assuming) so the Vista partition is correct (you don't want to clear all your MountedDevices entries). Also, though the instructions in the post are for XP, the same instructions apply to Vista.
     
  6. MarkJohnson

    MarkJohnson Registered Member

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    Thank you for your help. I already figured it out. I just added my second hard drive and my system would boot with preparing the desktop, but would let me access it as it was mounted as D: while my second drive mounted as C:. I just did the regedit and changed C; to D: and vice versa and voila it now works great.

    Thanks again
    -=Mark=-
     
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