RESTORE EMERGENCY

Late last night, while testing what I thought was my external hard drive, I accidently formatted my C drive. I did not realize this drive is the same make and size as the external hard drive that I use to make Acronis backups. I have been up all night trying to restore my C drive from the full Acronis backup. I have successfully copied the partition including the Windows XP Pro operating system from the external drive to the C drive - although I was having problems with the drive letter changing behind my back. This was finally solved by a Dell support technician in the wee hours - it was caused by interference from something else connected to the system while I was tinkering.

In any case, after the restoration is completed, the system does not boot - an error message comes up like "Cannot access disk - check hardware"
I downloaded the Master Boot Record iso file, burned it onto a CD using the "data" setting on my Dell Sonic Record software, and tried to boot off it to no avail. In addition, the drive letter may have changed again, although nothing was connected to the system except for the backup "D' drive.

I am getting increasingly anxious about this because I use this computer in my business.

Any suggestions would be appreciated - even if only to reclaim my data files.

 

In another topic here some suggested checking the boot.ini file for the partition info on it. But of course this means putting the unbootable drive into a bootable system.

Search for other topics dealing with the boot.ini file.

 

Thanks for the reply. Although by this afternoon I had succeeded in recovering my data files, I was becoming steadily more depressed as I contemplating trying to reload 20 or more programs, with all their updates, passwords, tweeking, etc.

As it happens, an hour or so ago I found a post by Selwyn nearby in this forum that addresses this exact error message. I followed his suggestions concerning the c:\windows\bootcfg options and, lo and behold! my system booted back - only about 18 continuous hours and three fruitless conversations with earnest Dell support people (two from India and one from Virginia) after I had blundered.

Of course it would be nice if all these little hinks and kinks could be placed in one file. However, having a forum like this once again proves its worth.

Michael

 

Glad you found it and got the problem solved.

 

Since this is a Dell system, it may have a Utility partition in front of the C (Windows) partition and possibly a third partition for a Dell recovery image after the C partition. The two Dell partitions are hidden and not assigned drive letters although True Image will show them if they exist.

To ensure that a restore is bootable, it's important to include all the partitions in the image of the drive. That makes for a larger image, but when restored, it will boot without problems.

If you want to have smaller backups, you can make one image of the entire drive and then only image the C partition after that. If you wipe the whole drive or replace it with a new drive, first restore the image with all the partitions. Then restore the most recent image of just the C partition. They system will boot, and you will have the most recent files.