No Bootable Drive Found

I created an image of a 40GB drive (the whole drive was one volume). Replaced the drive with another 40GB drive that was quieter and booted off the TrueImage boot disk I had created. Restored the image to the new drive (it took about 1hr 40min and was only about 2.5GB) and rebooted. Got the message that no bootable OS could be found. I'm using WinXP Pro SP2. The BIOS shows the drive OK and it's in the boot sequence. I used the WinXP cd and booted off of it to inspect the drive and found all the files were on it. Question: Why wouldn't it boot? I had to reinstall WinXP Pro and reactivate it (which wiped out all my settings and forced a reinstall of Office too). Very irritating! TIA

 

Hmm if you backed up the whole drive it should have been ok. I know this doesn't help this time but for next time you can try to fix your mbr as instructed here https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317

Hope this helps,

Chris

 

Thanks Chris. I downloaded the ISO and will try that next time. I was really surprised when the restore didn't work because is was the same size drive and the whole drive was one volume and the process seems to be so straightforward. Also, the TrueImage that I bought was thru NewEgg and was downloaded about 3 wks ago so it should be fairly up to date. I may wipe the old drive and try a restore on it just to see if I can get it to work. This software could be a real life-saver if I can make it work. I keep getting infected with viruses, etc. from the internet despite having a firewall, the latest MacAfee A/V, spam/popup blockers, etc. and it would be great to be able to just wipe the drive and start over periodically. Nothing else seems to work and I'm tired/frustrated of having to buy updates to stuff that's not really that effective. Constantly having to just react to what the bad guys are doing is not the way to go. I would just rather make their efforts irrelevant by wiping and re-imaging once a week. Thanks again.

 

I assume you are using Acronis true Image 8. Please make sure that you are using the latest build which is 800 and it is located here http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/support/updates/ . If anymore problems just post back and hopefully myself or someone else can help.

Thanks,

Chris

 

That's a really good plan. Testing the Restore is essential to any backup plan. I suggest you also make a new image and be sure that you check the box for the drive rather than just the box next to C: to be sure you have made an image of the entire drive. As long as you do that, the restored image should boot.

I agree about the problem with crap from the Internet. It can take hours and hours to clean some stuff off while restoring an image can take minutes. Sometimes theres some data that you need to save, but that doesn't take long normally, and it's so good to know you are back to a clean system.

 

Jim, as Chris said, if you backed up the drive, and not just the partition, it should work. So where you 100% correct when you wrote "I created an image of a 40GB drive"?

Imaging just the partition does not include the initial bootstrap code that the BIOS loads. The error message you refer to ("Got the message that no bootable OS could be found") - did that come from the BIOS, or from the NT loader (either before or after the boot menu is displayed)?

Re-installing Windows must have created a new bootstrap and/or added a missing NT loader. In that case, you should be able to simply restore from the image, overwriting everything in the partition, but since the the bootstrap and loader is not part of the image, they should stay in place. And they should not be able to detect that the contents of the partition has been replaced, so when the boot menu proceeds to load Windows, it will find the operating system where it expects it - on C:

 

I'm not at home to try it right now but in thinking it over it occurs to me that the second drive had been used in another system and was not the active partition. Now that it's been rebuilt with WinXP reloaded and all, it's designated the active partition. If I now restore the image over what's on there it should boot, don't you think?