Another Unbootable after clone problem

Hi I have a laptop with a slow disk, yesterday I bought a fast disk
a usb enclosure and bought the latest Acronis True Image via
download.

My laptop is a dual boot WinXP/Linux system and I use grub to boot.

1) I installed True Image and made a standalone CD.
2) I put the new disk into the usb enclosure.
3) I booted the standalone CD and cloned the laptop disk
to the new disk in the usb enclosure.
4) I swapped the two drives and tried booting into linux and failed.
I used a linux rescue disk and noticed that the linux partition number
had changed. I edited grub.conf and did a grub-install.
5) I was able to reboot into linux ok and the "noboot" dvd player
software was able to play dvds.
6) Choosing WinXP from the bootlist at boot time generates a
disk read error immediately. I cannot boot WinXP.
*****
I have compared the first thousand or so bytes of the old drive and
new drive XP partitions and they appear to be identical.

I have dd'ed 28GB from the WinXP drive to /dev/null and it got no
errors ( the partition is about 48GB).

I suspect the XP boot process is seeing something it does not like...
Note the clone process did slightly increase the size of the XP
partition.

Is there any hope of recovery?

Jerry

 

Instead of doing a Clone, try Imaging the original drive temporarily to the new drive, then burn the image to CD or DVD. Next put the new drive in the laptop and Restore the Image from the CD or DVD, to it.

A successful Cloning seems to be very dependent on the hardware in use. Some workarounds may or may not work.

 

This worked for me!

This evening I decided to try an "exact" copy, I read somewhere that
XT kept infomation in such a way that plopping something into a bigger
partition might be problematic...

Anyway I put the old disk into the USB carrier and choose the "as is"
option to do the clone to the new drive now in the laptop.

After the clone, grub would not reboot so I rebooted with a linux
rescue DVD and edited grub.conf to reflect the linux partition number
(it changed from a 3 to a 4). Reinstalled grub by grub-install /dev/hda
rebooted.

This time the grub menu appeared (Yea!) I choose WinXT to boot
and it worked!!!!,

Rebooting linux also worked...

I wish the "True Image" folks could figure out why there seems to
be such a problem with cloning XP....

Jerry

 

Glad you got it worked out.

I think part of the problem with TI is that it is trying to do too many things - you know, be all things to all people, so-to-speak.

 

Could the problem be with XP being so controlled with respect to licencing that TI is bumping against a licensing permission issue?

 

No, product activation is checked well after the boot process starts.

Acronis indicated a while back that it isn't a simple problem given the variations that exist. I don't really know but it sure would be nice if the MBR was included in every image or full backup.