cloned disk won't boot

I'm sure this has been covered many times,but I can't seem to find an answer. I cloned my 60GB hitachi drive (out of a thinkpad T43-2686 running xp pro) to my brand new 100GB hitachi drive using the latest Acronis True Image (downloaded today). Everything during the cloning process went fine. Both partitions (C,D) were created and data was copied. BUT this disk will not boot. It shows the IBM splash screen and then the screen goes blank and shows a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. I've done fdisk /mbr and also fixmbr under windows xp recovery. bootcfg under windows recovery show the proper startup location.

Any ideas? I was hoping Acronis would solve this problem. I purchased Norton Ghost first and had the EXACT same problem. I'd be more than happy to pay my license fee if it will just work!

 

Hello darths68,

Did you remove the original HD immediately afte cloning and before booting into Windows again from the new HD? If not then you probably have the DiskID problem discussed in this <Dan Goodell article>. Use Method #3 (Kaweki's Trick) to overcome the problem.

If you don't have access to a Windows 98 Startup Disk send me a Private Message with your email address (must be able to take a 2.3MB attachment) and I will forward an ISO file that you can burn to CD.

Regards

 

[QUOTE (out of a thinkpad T43-2686 running xp pro) to my brand new 100GB hitachi drive using the latest Acronis True Image (downloaded today). =.......
Any ideas? I was hoping Acronis would solve this problem. I purchased Norton Ghost first and had the EXACT same problem[/QUOTE]

Did you buy the hitachi directly from ibm?
T43 use a 915 chipset and you will have sata vs pata issues. Ibm has different firmware to account for this. Some retail hitachi drives have eproms that can be flashed and some don't.
Hopefully you made the 8 recovery cd's fom your original drive. Don't do anything to your original drive until you have done this. This will also create the service partition on a restore.
Download ibm's Resue and Recovery software to do this or clone/image your drive.
Here is a link to a newer bios to correct your problems.
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,106660,00.html
and
http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-59096
Also, if you don't have it, consider getting the 2nd hdrive ultra bay adapter from ibm. I will PM you with more info.

 

Thanks for the replies

I booted from a win98 disk and ran fdisk /mbr - no luck - it still boots to a single blinking cursor in the upper left corner almost instantly - no windows splash screen or anything close

I also did a repair of XP from CD - the repair went fine but then wouldn't boot after finishing!

When I first cloned the disk, I let the computer shutdown automatically as defined by the Acronis software at the end of the cloning procedure. At this point I removed the disk (it was connect via a USB-to-IDE converter) and installed it in the laptop.

The new disk is not an IBM disk, which causes a 2010 BIOS error. However this is just a warning and I patched the BIOS so it no longer stops. To make sure this wasn't causing the problem, I installed winXP from CDs - worked with no problem - booted up fine (I cloned again after doing this!). It's just the cloning that's causing the problem.

 

I should also point out that I did use partitionmagic on the disk I am cloning previously. Does this make it "unclonable"?

I ran the Norton tools I got with Ghost on the cloned drive and it says there are geometry errors on the disk.

 

Are these the original ibm rescue cd's?
If yes, is the "ibm service_partition created on the new drive?
Is the "ibm_service partition" still on the original drive?

 

I used a retail winXP cd to do the testing with

I deleted the recovery parition a couple of months ago using partitionmagic

 

Check your private messages

 

No, the disk is not adversely affected by using Partition Magic.

I changed from Partition Magic to Acronis TI recently. This was because Partition Magic complained about geometry errors when ANY other program touched the partition tables.

 

Hello darths68,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

Could you please create Acronis Report in the way described below?

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;
- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer having the issue from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please submit a request for technical support. Attach the collected report.txt file to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

I am stuck with this because I used the method by Dan Goodell as suggested but my pc still gets stuck at the start up screen of windows XP. I did notice, if I have this right that Migrate Easy did actually select that my hard drive should be called J as the old one was but it still won't boot. I am a bit reluctant to try method #2 as it takes away the registry and if it doesn't work after that will I still be able to boot my pc because if not I will have lost both drives.

Better than Ghost by the way but I would have thought that this problem would have been solved by now with a little coding.