PC won't boot after installing TrueImage

Hello,

Yesterday I purchased a copy of TrueImage 8.0 for a customer's PC. The PC rebooted fine after installing the software. Then I asked the software to create an image of the hard drive in a secure zone and install the boot manage. I have not used this software much in hte past, but as I recall this instance, it seemed to want to do all of these tasks in sequence automatically. At the end of the process a dialogue box came up saying that all requested tasks had completed, and to re-boot the PC. When I re-booted the PC, all I got was a blinking cursor at the top of the display. My next action was to make a TrueImage boot CD on another PC (with the same copy of the software). When I initially booted from this CD, I selected the option to set up the boot manager thinking that something must have gone wrong when the setup wizard did it before. Now when I power up the PC, the prompt to press F11 does come up, but if I leave the machine alone it will not boot to Windows. If I press F11 and select the boot to Windows option, I get an error saying that there is no operating system found.

What went wrong here, can I get back to a functional PC without wiping the hard drive?

Thanks for your time

David Moen

 

Oh, I almost forgot, this PC is running WIndows 98. If I boot from a Windows 98 starup disk, it reports that there are no valid partitions on the hard drive.

 

Hello Dave,

If you opt to activate the Startup Recovery Manager (SRM) as part of the Secure Zone creation process True Image will modify your hard drive's Master Boot Record (MBR). It looks as if something has gone wrong along the way.

Hopefully you have acces to a Win98 Startup floppy disk. If so boot from it and run the command "fdisk /mbr" (without the quotes). This will return the MBR to normal and, by so doing, removes the SRM.

Remove the floppy, reboot and see whether it now boots into Windows.

Regards

 

Thanks for your time.

I tried that and it got me back to where I was before I booted from the TrueImage recovery CD - blinking cursor in the top left corner of the display.

 

"Antivirus" active in the bios?

Some bioses (sp?) have this "feature" where overwriting the MBR is denied by the bios. Works like a charm in DOS, you get a nice big box on screen asking you wether or not to overwrite the MBR.

In windows, most of the time, this doesn't work, or very dirty. I've seen big black boxes and a freezing windows, spontaneous reboots, damaged mbr's.

Check if there's anything like that in the bios.

In your case, something must've gone wrong installing the secure zone. I suggest you boot from a win98 install floppy and run FDISK /MBR, and see what happens. If you can boot again, check the install of TI later, the secure zone won't be ok I guess...

 

Hello David,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are really sorry for the inconveniences.

It is difficult to tell what is wrong since there are no error messages shown even after you fixed MBR. Could you please do the following:

- Download Acronis Report utility from http://www.acronis.com/files/support/AcronisReport.exe;
- Run Acronis Report utility and select the "Create bootable floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the floppy drive and proceed with creating the bootable diskette;
- Boot the computer under consideration from this diskette and wait for report creation process to complete;
- Send the report.txt file from the floppy disk to support@acronis.com along with the link to this thread.

This would provide us with detailed information on the hard disk partition structure and let us provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman