Restored HD won't boot.

While I have been using TrueImage (v8.0 Corporate Workstation) to backup my boot drive for quite some time, yesterday was the first I needed to restore from a backup image - to my surprise, the computer would not boot off the restored partition (one partition boot drive). The backup image verifies fine, the restore completes without any errors but when booting the system it says no drives found. Not a NT boot problem, it says no drive found. The BIOS will still properly list the two SCSI drives but very early in the boot I will get the message that no drives found. I get the same message if I boot with a Windows CD and choose REPAIR.

TrueImage 8.0 (build 1213)
Dell 360 workstation
(2) SCSI drives - 1st for Windows XP SP2 boot, 2nd for backup.
Scheduled TI backup, full on first of month, incrementals rest (weekdays).

Anyone know what the problem is? Why won't a full backup restore as bootable?

Thanks in advance... Bill

 

Bill,

So it was a straight forward restore to the same HD. No HDs were removed from the computer?

Is the partition "active"? In Restored Partition Type, did you choose Active or Primary?

 

Restore was to a different hard drive - identical make and model but never had an OS on it.
I restored to hard drive as ACTIVE partition.

Any ideas?

THanks, Bill

 

Bill,

I haven't used SCSI HDs. Any jumpers etc that would make it look different from the original HD? Looks OK in the BIOS? Is there a Restore MBR option in TI 8?

Did you restore to a partition or to unallocated space?

 

Since this is the first time you ever tried to restore, perhaps version 8 cannot handle SCSI drives in a restore. It is a rather old version.

As you still have your bootable original, I would make a new backup using the Rescue CD and try the restore again - using the Rescue CD for this also.

 

It's been a while since I've worked with SCSI drives. Have you verified that the drives are properly terminated (I think that's what they call it)?

I don't know if this would have an effect on whether or not the drives would show up in the BIOS properly or not. I would assume that if not terminated, they would not show up in the BIOS. However, maybe they would, but not be able to be accessed properly.

 

Yes, checked and verified the SCSI ID - I have work a lot with SCSI. I replace the good boot drive with this replacement (identical drives and SCSI ID's) and restore. From TI everything looks good and logical.
Is the backup missing the drive boot record information? I didn't see where you can select this - I assumed that the backup was complete copy of the drive - maybe that is where I am going wrong.
If so, how can I use TI to backup a DRIVE, not just a partition?

Bill

 

In the Backup dialog windows as long as you put the tick (check) mark against Disk 1 you will backup the entire drive.

 

The DISK 1 checkbox was selected BUT there was two partitions listed and only the "SYSTEM (C: )" was selected. The other, a 31MB FAT partition was not selected possibly because it was a Dell diagnostics hidden partition that I didn't think was necessary. Now that I think about it, all partitions on a disk need to be selected otherwise TI does not create a bootable drive (copy the MBR). That may be where I went wrong and will test with another full backup.

Thanks to all for your input...

Bill

 

Bill, to save time why not try writing boot code with fdisk /mbr. You may still have to fix your boot.ini but see if the new boot code helps.

 

Usually when the check mark is put against Disk 1, this automatically puts check marks in all the sub parts to Disk 1 - thereby selecting ALL parts of the disk. Was this not the case?

 

Just to rule everything out. Check your drive letters. Rule that out first than work your way out.
I always check that first with windows xp, I don't care what the descrepency is, I always rule out the drive letters.

But I think it probably will be some sort of hard ware related, I have had problems restoring sata drives, to the point that I don't use them as boot drives because I don't trust them.
Try the demo of paragon justboot corrector to boot up your computer. If that program doesn't see your drive, then you definitely have a motherboard/hard drive configuration problem.

I don't think it's a software problem because acronis succesfully backedup and somewhat restored that image to a new hard drive with no problems except that it wouldn't boot (which isn't uncommon).

 

Assuming the new disk is being properly recognised by Windows,

the CLONE function ,not Image Restore,should work.

 

Operator error...

I have successfully imaged my SCSI boot drive and restored to an identical disk. The problem was that the whole disk was not selected for imaging - only the Windows boot partition. The small Dell diagnostics FAT partition was not selected and TI requires all partitions of a drive to be selected to create a bootable restore.

Thanks for all that have chimed in....

Bill