Need help: Copied boot drive

I made a mirror of my boot drive (upgraded my drive from 9GB to 80GB), then disconnected the old drive. When I reboot, my Windows installation hangs at the XP splash screen--normally the screen that shows the Windows XP logo + "Windows is starting up" only shows the Windows XP logo.

When I reconnect my old drive (in addition to the new drive), I am able to get the system up and running (but all the drives are now mislabeled).

Any help would be appreciated!

 

Hello shrewdinvestor,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that we recommend you to unplug one of the hard drives right after the disk cloning process has been finished, since keeping both original and cloned hard drives connected might cause different boot or drive letter assignment problems.

Please create special Bootable Rescue CD (if you have not done it yet), boot your PC from this CD and perform the disk cloning process once more. Unplug the original hard drive then, boot your PC from the new hard drive and see if the problem still persists.

If the problem still persists then please create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;
- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer having the issue from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;
- Collect the report file from the floppy;

Please keep only the destination hard drive connected to the PC while creating Acronis Report.

Send this report to support@acronis.com along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Argh...maybe I'm a moron or maybe the instructions could use a lot of clarification...or both.

I will do as you've suggested, but am afraid that I did not disconnect the source drive. I think this caused the boot strap to be on the destination drive, but the system points to system files on the source drive. Now the current system is looking even uglier...C: (destination) now also appears as "G:" (like a symbolic link in the UNIX world) and the source's volume name appears in blue--disconnecting the source prevented my system from booting...

 

Hello shrewdinvestor,

I understand the problem which is that your operating system needs both hard drives to be connected in order to work properly, since it boots from one of the drives and uses the system files residing on the other drive. This happens because of a wrong drive letters assignment. Moreover, this is the reason why we recommend to unplug one of the hard drives right after the disk cloning process has been finished.

The only thing I can recommend you to try is to reassign the drive letters manually from Windows Disk Management (Start -> Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management).

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Actually, I reread my prior post, and it looks like I DID disconnect the source drive.

I'll perform the diagnostic so that we can hopefully resolve this.

 

I'm not sure if it matters but I had this exact same problem. Only difference is that I was restoring from an Secure Zone that I created on a larger HD that I had in my system already (my primary HD had failed mechanically). I bought a new HD and copied the image to it - and I was getting stuck at the same win xp splash screen.

I think my problem was that I was exiting the acronis boot manager and allowing windows to start up, instead of just turning off my system. To fix I just did a hard power off after restoring the image and restarted, everything worked great. Hopefully this helps out some.