True Image trashed my computer!

I have a desktop machine with a 6Gb disk running Win2K which I wanted to upgrade to a 40Gb disk. I've just bought (online) True Image 8, so I started the "clone disk" wizard. I picked "Manual" over "Automatic" as I wanted to partition the new disk into two. I went carefully through the stages, being particularly careful over which was the "new" disk and which the "old". I saw the screen explaining that two reboots would be necessary, and gave the go-ahead.

It rebooted almost immediately, but couldn't boot: "ntldr" missing. Acronis support (which took days to respond) want me to extract the disks, mount them in another machine and run their diagnostic. This is a small-form-factor machine and getting the disks out is a pain. Any other ideas? I should be able to boot from floppy (now that the replacement cable has arrived).

Just as well I have another machine!

Philip Herlihy

 

Hello Philip,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

Please accept our apologies for your inconvenience.

Could you tell your Acronis request # which was sent to you as an autoreply to your first letter? I will try to solve your problem without removing the hard drives out of the computer.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Wow, that's a quick response! The ticket number is 190274. I'll have to run back and forwards to the room where the other machine is.

Phil

 

By the way, Acronis support did manage to reply twice in the time it took to get the validation email for these forums, which has been almost a week!

 

Hello Philip,

I have found your letters and since now I will be answering to you and will do my best to solve the problem. Please accept our apologies for the problem being not solved yet.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Just to note that I'm now working directly with a support agent from Acronis and may have to delay things on my side. I'll post back with the outcome when we have one.

 

For starts, you might try disconnecting the new hard drive, and re-connecting the old one and see whether the PC will boot. (TI8 should not have changed what was on the original, just made a copy onto the new one.) If that test works, you might have a relatively simple case of boot loader and/or drive letter confusion.

In the days of DOS and win98 the operating system always had to be on the first partition on the primary hard drive, which was determined by jumper settings and by position on the IDE cable. 2K and XP are more flexible, which is both good and bad. However, they still require three files to be on the primary hard drive, first partition (that windows can see). These are NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI. The first two are standard Microsoft files. The third is made by the windows installation, but can be changed by any text editior.

BOOT.INI can also be "rebuilt" by the BOOTCFG command of the recovery console. (A least it can in XP; I assume 2K works similarly.) Here are sojme links to the recovery console:

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm

http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm

http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm


The importance of BOOT.INI is that it points to one (or more) installations of windows (2K, XP, etc). Normally it just points to the WINDOWS directory on C:, but it can point to other drives. Is it possible that the new hard drive is not C:, but D:, E:, etc? Once windows (2K, XP, not 98, not DOS) defines a drive and letter, it tends to stick with that letter, even if lower disk letters are removed. Thus, your problem might be as simple as changing BOOT.INI to point to the correct drive letter.

By the way, you can play with BOOT.INI without getting into the windows installation, at least for testing. Make a floppy disk with the three files I mentioned, place it in A:, then reboot. See Microsoft article Q314079 (now might be 314079) for more info.

 

Thanks for this most helpful and interesting contribution. One of my difficulties is that my time is now fully committed for several days, but I'll experiment as you suggest just as soon as I can.

Thanks - most appreciated!

Phil Herlihy