No boot after restoring to new Laptop Drive

I used TI 9 (build 3567) to backup and restore to a new drive in my laptop. I used the TI boot disk for both backup and restore. I've tried restoring with and without the MBR, selected in TI.


The restore process went fine, no errors. But upon reboot, I get a blank screen, and the drive light is on solid.

I tried XP recovery FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, no help. What am I overlooking? This is a 60gb drive that replaced a 40gb. This is an older laptop, could it be incompatible with this new Seagate HD?

Thanks.

 

one quick suggestion, make sure your c: partition is ACTIVE/PRIMARY; sometimes on a restore, that partition on the new disk does not get flagged as active.
Disk Director or Partition Magic can do the change.

 

The first time TI didn't ask which partition was to be "active". I restored the entire drive: The hibernation partition, the MBR/Track0, and the C: partition.

The second time I restored only the C: partition, and was asked if it was to be "active" so I selected "active". This time I was permitted to enlarge it to fill the new, larger drive. Not sure why this wasn't offered the first time. But no dice. Blank screen on boot. Not sure why this didn't work... because I didn't select MBR too?

 

When you made the image of the original drive, did you select all the partitions on the drive? Some systems have more than one partition with some of the partitions normally invisible, but TI will show you them when you are backingup. You may have to reinstall the original hard drive to be sure you did it this way, but failure to do so is one big reason for getting an unbootable drive when you restore and image.

 

I'm certain that I selected all partitions. I checkmarked the "Drive x" checkbox that in turn checkmarked ALL the partitions.

 

Ok, that's good.

Where did you store the image so that you could restore it to the new drive? Did you check the image after you made it?

 

I stored the image on a linux samba server on my home network. After I created the image I ran a verify and it checked out OK.

 

Well, it looks like you did everything right. Imaged the entire hard drive, verified the image after it was saved and then restored the entire image to the new drive.

Other than simply repeating this process to be sure that nothing was left out, I can't offer any improvements over what you did. There is a possibility that a network error occurred during the restore. Large files can cause that. A work around is to split the file into smaller pieces of 700MB when making the image.

If you have access to an external hard drive you could try imaging to that instead of the network drive.

If you haven't checked the new hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostic disk, I'd try that.

 

I wonder if there is some sort of incompatibility between the new Seagate drive and the old laptop bios? The bios was set to "auto" for the drive, and it looked like it determined that "LBA" was the access method. I don't know much about this subject, just wondering if it could have something to do with the no-boot problem.

 

The good news is that the BIOS recognized the drive in AUTO, and LBA makes sense. 60GB doesn't cross any obvious boundaries, so it should be OK.

However, running the manufacturer's diagnostic disk should confirm that it is working properly. The diagnostics can usually be downloaded from the drive manufacturer's web site if you didn't get a disk with the drive.

 

Hello Secure1,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please tell us if you restored with resizing?
Please let us know if the destination hard drive is larger than the original.

Could you please do the following?

- Download Acronis Report utility from http://download.acronis.com/support/AcronisReport.exe;
- Run Acronis Report utility and select the "Create bootable floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the floppy drive and proceed with creating the bootable diskette;
- Boot the computer under consideration from this diskette and wait for report creation process to complete;
- Get the report.txt file from the floppy disk.

Please submit a request for technical support. Provide the report.txt file and information collected in 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.
--
Anton Sherkhonov