Can't restore my hard drive properly using TI Home 10

The internal hard drive on my 60GB Dell Inspiron 510 laptop was recently replaced. Until the failure I had made incremental backups of the whole drive using TI Home 10 onto a USB connected external hard drive (120 GB).

However, I have been unable to perform a full restore onto the new internal hard drive.

I know that my back up data is healthy as I can mount it on a desktop computer running Acronis software.

Using the boot CD I tried to restore my C drive image and the master boot record/track 0. All appears to go smoothly but when the computer reboots I got a message: "Windows could not start because of a computer hard drive configuration problem. Could not read from the selected book disk. Check the boot path and disk hardware".

At this point I reinstalled the Windows XP OS (from the CD provided when I bought the laptop). When I arrived back into the Windows environment I could see that "My Documents" files from my latest incremental back up have arrived but my software, e.g. MS Office, isn't running.

I would be very grateful for help.

 

Does your laptop have Media Direct? If so this may help Upgrading hard drive on Dell computer that contains MediaDirect/Host Protected Area.

 

Etienne,

Sounds like a boot.ini issue. This will happen if you restore the C: drive without the preceding Dell Diagnostic partition.

I'd try Method 2 if you see it again.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314477/en-us

 

Dear Brian,

I didn't follow your suggestion but you set me on the right path!

I realised that I had saved an image of the Dell diagnostic partition on my back up external hard drive. All fell into place when I restored my full "C drive" followed by the original diagnostic partition.

I'm not sure if this outcome was luck or growing understanding but I'm very happily using my laptop now as if nothing happened.

Thank you.

Etienne