image old hard drive to physically new HD

I am using Backup and Recovery 10.2 Free.
I do a full hard drive backup from an approx 75GB drive to a removeable drive. This consists of four partitions. I created a bootable recovery CD as directed by the BR software. I then replaced the 75GB drive with an approx 120GB HD. I booted the 120GB drive using the recovery CD and did a full disk recover from the removeable drive.
Question 1. The new reimaged HD now shows in Paragon BR and in Windows XP as a 75GB drive instead of the 120GB drive. I anticipated using the extra approx 45GB as a partition. I know I can only have 4 primary partitions, but thought I would see the 45GB of space as 'unallocated'. Any suggestions how to 'see' that 45GB?

Question 2. One of the partitions is a Windows recovery partition set up by the mfg to reload the C: drive to the original installallation. If I do a CTRL-F11 on the original drive it boots into the recovery partition. But on the new drive I receive
"Cannot restore
NTLDR is missing"

NTLDR is not missing in that partition.
Any suggestions to fix this?

Thanks

 

Are you able to add the newly imaged recovery partition to the XP boot menu?

 

Not exactly sure what you mean by "boot menu". If you mean boot.ini, it is the same as the original, as I would expect it to be. Otherwise please be more explicit. Thanks.

 

Oem's often use peculiar chs values for their recovery partitions. That is probabaly why when you select CTRL-F11 the partition offset can't be found.

It is notoriously difficult to retain the use of those keys after restoring an image.

You can try a couple of things:

1. Add a line to the boot.ini on your XP partition for the recovery partition - you will then get a boot menu allowing you to select either.

( If you post a screenshot of disk management window so we can see the partition/disk arrangement, someone will show you how to do that ) .

OR

2. If the recovery partition is a Primary partition AND it contains ntldr, ntdetect.com , and boot.ini of it's own ( pretty sure it does ), mark it active - on reboot it should start up.

Make sure you have a method of marking the XP partition active again , eg Paragon boot cd.

 

Thanks for replying to my quandry. I believe I have determined the problem behind my first question and have given up on reolving both questions 1 and 2.
Question 1. It appears DELL has used a Host Protected Area at about the 75GB mark to store its MediaDirect product. It also appears that the boot record contains info to ensure anything above 75GB (or so) remains a HPA, thus the first time I booted my new drive, the HPA was established thus "protecting" all space from the 75GB mark upwards. Had I known this was the case, I probably could have modified the MBR to not create a HPA. I could probably undo the HPA, but from what I have researched, it appears to be more bother than it is worth.

Question 2. Since it appears that the MBR also controls the detection of CTRL-F11 to boot the Dell Recovery Partition, I believe something is messed up there also, and at this point I don't know that I really care. At some point, I thought it would be nice to start fresh even though it would mean reinstalling the several software products I (actually my daughter) added since purchasing the laptop.

Just wanted to pass this info on in case someone else has similar problems.

 

Dan Goodell has some good info here: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/
Not sure how old your system is but I was able to decipher all this and get the DSR partition reimplemented on both my laptop and my wife's and ended up capturing "out of the box" images for both machines for later restore independent of Ctrl-F11 functionality. YMMV - but it's the best reference for this I've found to date insofar as DYI - just in case you are interested. It does require some intestinal fortitude, a smidgen of comfortability with technical aspects, and a robust imaging discipline (at steps along the way) to cover your bases and not get beyond a point of no return.

Even if you don't want, need, or feel up to doing the full exercise, it can be very informative reading.