windows stays at logon screen after restore

I recently did a backup of my C: (IDE) drive of my desktop and wanted to restore it to a larger (SATA) drive that has 2 partitions and already has data in the second partition. The SATA drive was basically a second drive for storing data. I partitioned it in 2 pieces because I knew I would eventually want to boot from my sata drive.

I want to restore to the first partition of the sata drive. Since I have the second partition with 200GB of data I did not want to do a clone of the drive and have to move the data to a third drive so I used the restore option.

I am using version 9.0 of ATI Home which has served me well. However, when I boot from my sata drive I get hung up on the logon screen. I read on this message board and other places that one solution is a boot corrector which costs $20 which I don't want to buy to use once. I also heard in the same thread that you could use a win98 bootable floppy and fix it that way although several people say that does not work.

I am wondering before I use the boot corrector if there is some method that would work. I could move the 200GB of data to a different drive however I'd rather not. And then clone the drive and see if that works.

I also tried doing a repair with the windows xp cd but during the reinstallation it also hangs and does not complete.

One other question is that it takes quite a while to backup 12GB (my partition with XP on it). I don't know if there is something I can do to make that faster.

The first partition was approx. 50GB and the second was approx. 300. When I purchased my SATA drive I assumed I would format it asap possible but I ended up waiting a while and now I have about 200GB of data on the second partition.

 

chapashop,

Thanks for the detailed post.

I suspect you created an image of your C: drive when it could see the partition where it would eventually be restored. Is that correct?

When the image is restored it takes the drive letter of the previous partition which is not C: and it won't boot. Running fdisk /mbr from a Win98 boot floppy will zero the DiskID and allow Windows to recalculate drive letters. It will adopt C: drive letter and boot.

 

Drive letter problems only occur with windows xp/server2003 and windows2k.

First you need to verify that the drive letters are indeed your problem. You can use the demo of "justboot corrector" or a "bartpe with the savepart plugin" to check your drive letters. NEW update - "savepart" is now also available as a standalone bootcd, just download the file that says "spartiso.zip" and burn it onto a boot cd with imgburn or nero.
http://www.partition-saving.com/

There are 2 drive letters that might get changed which will give you problems. !.)"partition ID drive letter" and 2.)"mounted device drive letter". Both of these have to match in order for the computer to boot up.

The "mounted device drive letter" can be fixed using the win98 boot floppy disk, also you can use a bartpe and manually change the mounted device drive letter with regedit.

The "partition ID drive letter" can only be changed with a "boot corrector" and according to some information that I've read the "savepart" plugin in the bartpe can change it. After numerous attempts with "savepart" I was unsuccessful, but the program itself seems to have the capability of doing it. The program is not user friendly.

I can't recommend the "paragon justboot corrector" , it's 2 years old and obsolete and no longer updated. I only recommend it as a troubleshooting tool, but even then it won't bootup the latest computers.

I also can't recommend the latest version ( updated to feb 2008 )of the "boot corrector" because of the price ($40.00) . It's only available in "paragon partition manager version 9.0" bootcd. The only reason I bought it is because I know the power of the "boot corrector". If your computer absouloutly has to fixed no matter what, than it might be a good investment. Even though I rarely use it, it's a tool that works very well, it's always nearby when I restore my hard drives.

 

Brian,

The weirdest thing happened. The machine is booting up now with my new drive that I did a restore on. I have to say I did do a FDISK /MBR command but I don't think that was it.

I had tried restoring from a tib several times over the last several days. I had read your post about using doing a FDISK rand other post about a boot corrector. I did a restore last night and did not attempt to boot because I wanted to get some additional answers from the forum. Since yours and a second were things I had already seen I figured I would try the FDISK option however as I created the bootdisk I was remembering that Windows98 did not support NTFS drives. And also I was not sure if when I issued the FDISK command what drive letter it would use so I didn't think it would work but I did issue the command after booting from the floppy and basically did not think it would help anyway.

I have used acronis quite a bit but I guess I have always done a clone disk when switching from one hard drive to another. Like I said previously this I believe is the first time I tried to do the restore (tib) to the first partition without modifying my 2nd (data) partition.

 

I reread JonyJoe's post about using the windows98 floppy and maybe the bootdisk did fix it but I wonder how it would. I figured since I could not access the hard drive from the command prompt that the windows98 fdisk command would not have an effect.

thanks for the info, guys...