Problems booting up a cloned HD

I downloaded the trial version of TI today and tried cloning my old Maxtor 30gb HD to a new Seagate 160gb HD. Since I was using the trial version, I did the cloning on the computer, rather than the boot disk. Everything went fine until I physically switched the ribbon cables to make the 160 my primary HD. After the BIOS screen, and a few seconds of a black screen, this message popped up:

"Could not start because of the following ARC firmware boot
configuration problem:
Did not generate ARC name for HAL and system paths. Please
check Windows documentation about ARC configuration options
and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."

I was wondering what this means, what I did wrong, and how can I fix it to make my cloned drive work properly.

 

Did you boot the system with both drives still attached before you did the cable switch? You have to disable or physically remove the old drive before the first boot or it gets confused.

For general info on what may have gone wrong,you can also look at:
MS info on ARC

 

The only thing that was connected to the old drive when I switched the drives was the power cord. I had disconnected the ribbon cable from the old drive and set the new "cloned" drive in the master drive connector on the cable.

 

In tests that I have done cloning drives, I found that when there is a significant difference in the sizes of the drives, even though TI says the cloning was successful, when the cloned drive is booted the system comes up with an error - most commonly either "NTLDR is missing" or "Disk Read Error". In the former case the file is not actually missing.

Now whether the drives you are using would be considered to be of significant difference I don't know.

The way around this is to do an image backup instead of cloning. Of course this means having a third drive to store the image.

But in your situation, just for completeness, disconnect the power cord also and see what happens.

 

Okay, "just for grins", I tried booting the drive with everything unplugged from the old hard drive (ie. ribbon cable and power plug) and I STILL got the message I posted earlier. So what's the next option?

 

I am sure to some people, this is an easy fix. But to some computer illiterate people (like me), this is hopeless. Is there any way someone can give me some help before the the frontal lobes of my brain explode??

 

Hello G Mac,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that you can get that error message if the disk signature in the MBR (Master Boot Record) gets overwritten (for example, by a virus) or changed (corrupted) so that it no longer matches the signature() value in the Boot.ini file.

We recommend you to check each partition of your source hard drive by Windows utility:

- For Windows 9x please use Windows menu Start\Run
then enter the command "scandskw" and test all drives;

- For Windows XP please use Windows menu Start\Run, then enter the command
"chkdsk c: /r" "chkdsk d: /r" for every partition of your hard drives.

Please note that you will need to reboot your computer in order to scan the system partition.

We also recommend you to check your hard drive for viruses.

If the problem still persists after cloning, please take a look at the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base to resolve the problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q227704/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/119467/EN-US/

Thank you.
--
Tatyana Tsyngaeva

 

1. If you complete the clone again and then shutdown unplug the old drive and reboot I think it will work. then put the old drive back

2 Other wise what is the structure of your disk? what partition is windows installed on? C: D:

The boot.ini file will have arc path to the windows install ation - that references the disk like this

http://www.windowsfordevices.com/articles/AT4556932034.html


I think you problem is solvable by 1 or 2