Restoring MBR

Hi all,

I am having a bit of trouble restoring the MBR and system partition. I have a dual boot system set up to boot from either of two drives. System drive is on a 40Gb partition on a 160Gb drive. 2nd partition is used for page files and data, data is backed up by other means. I wish to make a bootable copy of the system partition to a second 40Gb drive, so I can boot from it if necessary. I rebuild the second drive whenever I update programs. Email is backed up separately. B/up & restore seems to go through OK, but when I try to boot from the second restored drive I get the hal.dll error, but hal.dll is in the root/system32 folder. Boot.ini on first drive is OK, has not been changed. I recall this worked OK on the previous build using the same process. Current build is 8101.

Problem 2

Backup archive seems OK, but on restore I am unable to select both MBR and data. I have to select "do you want to restore another partition" to get the mbr and data together. Is this normal behaviour? I do not recall having to do this on the previous build, although the disk may have had an MBR already.



Steve

 

Not an expert on this but apparently one of the requirements for restoring an MBR is that the disk have the same number (not necessarily size) of partitions.

Having to restore the MBR as a second partition is the way it has always worked and if the proper MBR is there in good condition there is no need to restore it.

 

OK,

Problem solved. The boot.ini file was pointing to the wrong drive for the backup OS. I had reconfigured the drive placement and the backup drive was now the first drive on the second IDE port, instead of the second drive on the first IDE port. I had not changed the boot.ini file to reflect this.

Steve