Cloned drive probs

Got myself a copy of True Image Home 10 recently and am having trouble making a bootable clone drive. Using XP sp2 have 2 identical western digital se16 drives. TI reports no problems with the cloning procedure and I remove the old drive when the PC shuts down after cloning. When rebooting with the cloned drive get message "error accesing operating system". When I put original drive back in and look in cloned drive there does not seem to be a mbr installed. Been trawling the forum and internet for a couple of days now. Help! Where am I going wrong?

 

Before you let the cloned drive boot for the first time, did you remove the original?

 

It's probably your drive letters. Get the demo of "paragon justboot corrector", burn the iso to a cd and use that to boot up your clone. Look in the registry of your system partition. The drive letter has to be the same as in the source drive usually c: . Something as simple as a wrong drive letter will give you alot of problems.
Usually it's not a MBR problem, all hard drives that are partition have a MBR. When cloning or just restoring a system partition, that partition should be automatically bootable on the new hard drive. The only time you will have a mbr problem is with vista and when restoring to a hard drive that has a 3rd party boot manager.
To fix your problem, if it's a drive letter problem is to change it back to the original position in the system registry.
You can try and redo the restoration but this time remove the source hard drive (the big cause of drive letter problems).
Note - fixmbr/bootfix/repair installations of windows won't fix the problem. The only thing that might fix it that deals with the MBR is using a win98 boot floppy and running the "fdisk/mbr" command , this will cause windows xp to release the drive letters and reset them with new drive letters.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=174958

 

In reply to DwnNdrty yes I did remove the cloned drive before reboot. Am using a caddy for this purpose to make it easier.
In reply to jonyjoe81, I downloaded and burnt a copy of Paragon jbbc demo. When booted with cloned drive in place the cd loade and then I got this message:
No swap space!
Z: \dos\bin>
Any clues as to what that means? In my original post I might have got the wrong message in quotes. Here is the correct one. The message I get when trying to boot from cloned drive is "error loading operating system"

 

Will other boot cd's work in booting up the computer? If they do you might have a bad burn of "paragon". Another user also had a problem burning the demo, but was eventually able to get a good copy.
This demo is the only program I found that can read the registry on a non-booting hard drive, which is what you need to verify your drive letters.

Maybe someone else here in the forums can recommend another program that can read drive letters.

I just ran an experiment and changed the drive letter on a windows xp installation (original system c: , data d: ) to "k" from "c", rebooted, the computer reached the logon screen and hang there. Next I booted up with the acronis 9.0 boot cd , I went to the recovery screen to check partitions to recover. It showed both my partitions. My system should have showed up as "k" but it was showing up as "c" my data partition showed correctly as "d" . I don't think the acronis boot cd can be relied to show accurate drive letters.

If you cannot get any boot cd's to boot up your computer, you might have a hardware configuration problem.

 

jeff1956,

I get the same error message with that CD.

Have you tried cloning using the Acronis boot CD instead of from Windows. If that doesn't work and it occasionally doesn't, consider different software for cloning.

It doesn't show accurate drive letters. It can't. But that doesn't matter.

"It is the boot OS which assigns drive letters when it starts up, and that assignment has no meaning unless that OS is the one booted. In a manner of speaking, drive letters exist "only in the mind of the OS that is booted."" ......Dan Goodell.

 

I just downloaded the demo of "paragon" to see if maybe it's got corrupted, it comes in a self burning package. I just unzipped that file with winrar. It unzipped to an ISO file.I burn that ISO with nero. When I installed the bootcd in my computer it booted it up to the "paragon justboot corrector" screen.
One thing I did notice was when I exit out of paragon and remove the cd, I do get the "Z: \dos\bin> " message on the dos screen. But the demo worked, and I could see my partitions and drive letters.

On windows xp, the system drive letter always remains the same. It only gets changed to a different letter, during cloning/imaging operations. But once it gets changed on the new hard drive it's permanent unless you go in the registry and manually change it back. All the other drive letters on other hard drives/cd roms those can be assign by windows during bootup.

All the drive letters can be read from the registry, even if the hard drive won't boot with the paragon justboot corrector demo. And it's very accurate, what it shows you is what windows sees when it boots up.

I would keep trying to read those drive letters and rule that out as your problem.

 

Just got myself a cloned drive! YAAAYYY!!! Thanks to BrianK for the fix. Had to download TI 10 again as might have got bad copy. Original boot disc informed me after booting that it could find no hard drives even though there were 2 installed. It worked ok with new bootdisc though. Just got the problem of WGA thinking that it is seeing new hardware and wants to be activated again. Can you get WGA off the system or are we stuck with it? Not sure if I remember reading somewhere that they (MicroSoft) were supposed to give you the choice of ditching it.