Cloned System Drive Does Not Boot

Hello,

I'm having trouble with a disk cloning operation. I've heard many users say good things about Acronis TrueImage, so I've downloaded v11 Home and am using the trial.

I recently purchased a new hard drive to replace/upgrade the drive currently in my laptop. As my laptop only has one hard drive, this means it's my bootable C:\ drive.

I do not have an external enclosure available, so I tried to clone it via a network with the new hard drive plugged into my PC. This is apparently not supported, so I had to pull the original laptop drive and put it into my PC as well. This, then, creates somewhat of a conflict as there are 2 C:\ drives - my PC's main boot disk, and the C:\ that was pulled from the laptop.

Since it is my PC after all, it boots off the correct disk and it assigns the laptop drive letter D:\ instead. I formatted my new laptop drive and assigned it letter T:\ so Windows could access it. I then loaded Acronis TrueImage 11 and conducted a Disk Clone operation from D:\ to T:\ using the proportional setting so that it would allow me to use all the space available on the new drive.

It completed the operation in about 27 minutes (~45GB of data.) I then placed the new laptop drive, freshly cloned from the original laptop drive, into the laptop.. but Windows will not boot. A quick search shows one possible cause being that the drive letters may have been messed up, and the recommended program was Paragon's JustBoot Corrector. I downloaded this and attempted to use it, but it failed to load for some reason.

Thankfully, I left the original drive intact, so I swapped out the new laptop drive for the original one and that still boots up properly. I'm not sure what went wrong here. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks in advance.

 

The trial version does not allow cloning from the Rescue CD. This would have been my recommendation but it is not an option with the trail version.

S0....from my standpoint, your best option would be to create a full disk backup where the disk option is checked.

Then do a "Partition Restore with Resize" as illustrated in my guide listed on line 3 of my signature.

Insert your new blank drive in its boot position.
External drive contains the backup.
Reboot from the TrueImage Rescue CD
Perform the Partition Restore with Resize when booted from the CD.
Afterward successful completion, Shutdown and disconnect the external drive before rebooting.

 

Is this windows xp or vista? if it's vista, you can probably rule out the drive letters.

Since this is a laptop, more than likely it has to do with "chs geometry" of the hard drive. To fix this you would have to do a "reverse clone". Example remove the source hard drive from the laptop and install the new hard drive in the laptop, next you would perform the clone. In your situation you would have to get an external enclosure or ide/sata bridge usb adapter in order to clone from the external to the internal.

What occurs when you try to bootup the drive you try to clone? are there any error messages etc.

 

Hello,

Thank you for the quick replies.

To respond-

I was not doing it from the Rescue CD, I was running it in Windows from my main PC. The often-recommended method is indeed to attach it to the laptop via an external enclosure. Unfortunately, I had stated that I do not have one. Thus, I hooked up both drives into my PC via spare SATA ports and cloned that way. This meant, though, that the drive letters were messed up.

Even if I had an enclosure, I'm not sure how that would work before Windows loads, as it would be essentially a USB device.

I apologize for leaving out something as important as the OS, but I am using Windows XP Pro 32-bit on both machines.

There are no error messages, but the laptop will stall at the screen just prior to when the Windows XP logo shows up to begin loading XP.

Thanks again.

 

Since you are trying to restore windows xp, that opens up the drive letter's as being the problem.

Usually the demo of "paragon justboot corrector" is the quickest way to check drive letters, but it's an old version that won't boot the latest computers.

You can try out the free "savepart" boot cd to verify your drive letters. It looks complicated but ir's a quick check. This will let you know if it's a drive letter problem or not. If it's not your problem, not too much time is wasted checking them.

Just download the file that says "spartiso.zip" and use nero or imgburn to burn the ISO to a CD.

1.)bootup with the savepart cd, type savepart at command prompt.
2.)next choose "update windows2000/xp/vista registry" doubleclick on it.
3.)next doubleclick on the "disk number 0" this is usually the hard drive that has your partitions.
4.)next click on the partition that has your system (make a note of the drive letter, this is your mounted device drive letter) most default installations it will be "c".
5.)the next screen is blue and has directorys, here choose the "WINDOWS" directory and doubleclick on it.
6.)On next screen just double click on the partition shown.
7.)It'll take you back to the screen on step 4, doubleclick on the "C" partition.
8.)Finally your in the "drive letter to affect this partition" box. This is where it will show you the "partition ID drive letter" it should be the same as the "mounted device drive letter".

If these 2 drive letters don't match, then you hard drive will not boot.
http://www.partition-saving.com/

The "chs geometry" problem only affects certain laptops, so you might be able to workaround it.

 

Thanks for the step-by-step instructions!

I've followed them and noticed a peculiarity.
After clicking on "Disk 0" it came to a screen to "Choose element where Windows is installed." You say make note of the drive letter ... but I don't see any drive letter here.

This is what I see so far (excuse the poor formatting):
Elements list:
Support | Num | D. | Element type | Size (Mb) | Name
Main part. | 1 | | QNX,OS/2,NT,Unix | 305242.81 | Nayuki

I know this is the correct drive as it has the proper name, but I assume "D." is where the drive letter should be and it's blank.

Continuing with the instructions, by step 7, I see the same screen as above, again without any drive letter.

Afterwards, in step 8, I see 2 values for "D."
Registry values list:
D. | Id. Disk
C: | 7deecd5a
F: | 9800481f

I guess this is indicative of the infamous drive letter problem? I have no idea where F: came from though.. How should I proceed?

Thanks again!

 

From looking at your readout it looks like your "partition ID" is ok.

Under element list the drive letter will showup under the letter "d" .

I tried booting up with the savepart ISO version 3.60, and I experienced the same problem you described with the drive letters not showing up on the elements list. I've tested the savepart ISO by itself before a while back and it worked similar to the plugin, but now I'll have to troubleshoot why it's not producing the same results.

I decided to try a bartpe with the savepart version 3.60 plugin and the drive letters where showing up as they are suppose to. Using the bartpe, savepart seems to show more information.

But in step 8 of your readout if you had a "partition ID" problem the drive letter "c" would not showup in the top spot. All you need to do now is verify your "mounted devices" drive letters. That's the easy one to fix. It should be c: to match your "partition ID".

You can use the any boot cd that can show you the "mounted devices" drive letters. true image boot cd, bartpe bootcd.

Below is the directions to change a "mounted devices" drive letter if you find that to be your problem.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=210322

 

Thanks again for the reply.

I assume by the "true image boot cd" you mean the recovery CD I burned from the trial version of TrueImage? I'm using that now and, while I'm not sure where exactly to go to find the "mounted device" drive letter, I went to Operations > Backup and it's listed the hard drive as C:

I'm not sure what this means.. If Acronis can detect it as C:, why can't Windows boot?

As an aside, I have just returned home and have borrowed a friend's SATA->USB cable so I could hook up the drive directly to the laptop and try to clone again if it would be easier and yield a better result. Since the trial version apparently will not do a disk clone with the recovery disc, I'm limited to booting off the old laptop hard drive and cloning within Windows. I'm thinking it may end up leading to this same result though.

Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks!

 

If acronis bootcd can detect the restored drive system partition as c: drive, that means the "mounted devices" drive letters is good. More than likely this rules out a drive letter problem on your restore drive.

Cloning from within windows on the laptop will probably lead to same problem, from what I read only a reverse clone will fix this. Maybe someone else has an idea on how to do it with your current configuration.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=209574

 

I'm going to try the reverse cloning procedure. As the original drive will be left intact, I suppose there isn't much to lose by trying this.

There seems to be a problem with the partition size though, at least when I'm trying to clone this using the Rescue CD. I'm looking at the clone wizard, but it seems I can't change my destination partition to take up the entire drive - it says it will clone it exactly as large as the source drive is, sort of like the "as-is" option.. only it stays the same for proportional and manual - I can't override it and tell it to take up the whole disk.

I suppose I can maybe use something like partitionmagic later to expand the partition on the new drive to take up the whole drive, but it is a little annoying. For now though, I'll go ahead with this and see if it even helps.

 

DarkRogue,

You can't do this from Windows. It must be from the boot CD.

 

Yes, I am using the boot CD burned from the main program.

I just ran into a problem though.. It seems to have failed to read a sector or something and aborted the process.. now it won't recognize either drive.

I've plugged in the original drive into my PC now and it's recognized the drive and all files on it are intact.. I'm running chkdsk on it now.

This is quite odd..

 

Can you do that with the trial version? Interesting?

 

I think - and hope - so. Otherwise, what am I looking at lol.

Chkdsk just finished scanning with no errors.. so that sector read error doesn't make any sense..

 

I think that's one of the limitations of the trial version - you can restore with it but you can't back up. The Windows version will let you do both but only for a limited time period.

In post #1 you mentioned that you have a network. When you boot your laptop from the recovery CD can you see the PCs on the network (only wired Ethernet is supported)? If so, here's what you can do since you don't have an external USB hard disk:

1. Boot the laptop into Windows.
2. Start the Backup Wizard
3. Choose to back up the entire disk (put a checkmark next to the disk to select all partitions)
4. Choose to save the backup to a PC on your network
5. When finished, shut down the laptop
6. Remove the old disk and install the new disk. It can be blank.
7. Boot the laptop from the recovery CD
8. Start the restore wizard
9. Choose the image file on your network PC as the source
10. Choose the new, blank hard disk on the laptop as the destination
11. Choose to restore all partitions
12. When finished, reboot into Windows to check the result

GroverH had it right in post #2, so follow his guide but substitute the networked PC for an external USB hard disk.

 

Thanks again for the reply.

I'm not sure what the limitation on the trial is other than a 15 day time limit, I seem to be able to do everything with it lol.

Yes, I do have a network. I haven't actually thought about doing it that way though because I was under the impression that something like this (backing up/restoring a booting system drive) required it to be cloned, and backing up an image was more suited for raw data.. I'm probably wrong here, so I'll go ahead and ask first:
What's the difference?

If you clone a drive, you should end up with 2 exact replicas of each other.
If you back up an entire drive as an image (I assume by checking "My Computer" when I hit backup) and then restoring it later, would it produce the same result, or are there some differences? Would it even be bootable?

In the end, I have borrowed a friend's SATA>USB cable, so I can hook up the drive to my laptop via USB, and I'm doing the reverse clone that way.

I don't know what happened before with the errors, TrueImage must've spazzed out or something. I think it tried to do a sector-by-sector copy, which is why it wouldn't let me change the partition size. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any place to disable sector-by-sector cloning. After the error and failing to detect both hard drives, I ran chkdsk with no problems.

I plugged everything back to the laptop and somehow it managed to work properly this time around. I just finished successfully doing a reverse-clone operation from my original HD via USB into my new HD, and it's booting successfully now.

What a mess.. it probably would've been less trouble to reinstall Windows lol.

Thanks again for all your help though, everyone.

 

Both operations produce the same end result. Imaging requires that a storage device be available to store the backup image on. Cloning skips that step and just copies directly from one drive to another. This can be illustrated (crudely) as:

IMAGE: Source disk --> Image File --> Destination disk
Clone: Source disk --> Destination disk

Many of us prefer imaging since you can fit multiple backup images on a single hard disk and they can be later restored at any future date. I've got almost 50 on a 500 GB USB external disk, some dating back 3 years.

The clone operation is more limiting. If you clone one disk to another that's all you get -- one copy.

 

If you managed to clone a drive and it stops at windows logo:

Search for a ms-dos/dr-dos boot diskette or bootable windows 98 CD.

Boot the laptop from diskette/CD.

At the command prompt run the command: "fdisk /mbr" (without the quote)

Remove diskette/CD

Reboot.


It should be working now.

 

Ah, thanks for the clarification.
I suppose I'll keep that in mind next time if I need to do something like this again.

I'm not sure what fdisk /mbr is supposed to do, but I suppose some Googling will reveal that.

Thanks again, guys.