Startup - Shutdown cycle after clone

Startup - Shutdown cycle after clone - Fixed!

I haven't used ATI for quite awhile so I decided to try 10 to prepare for installing vista.

After installing TI10, I did a full back up from my two disk sata raid array (320gb - 60 used) to a usb 320 gb hd. The verification checked good. I then tried to do a clone from the raid array to a formatted internal 320 gb ide drive. After the initial reboot, it never started the clone proceedure. I tried this several times. Not a big deal though as I used the boot cd that I made and chose clone there. The internal IDE drive now has a bootable operating system on it but is missing several of the drivers. I then planned on booting back to the raid array to format the internal ide HD and then test a recovery from the USB disk to the ide drive.

I started the computer and pushed f8 for the bbs, choosing the nvidia striped array to boot from. It booted, but seemed sluggish and several of my devices had to be installed. I then shut down the computer and physically unplugged the IDE drive to make sure that I wasn't mistakenly booting from it.

Now when I start up booting from the array, windows loads to the point where it says "Windows is starting up" and then it says "Logging off" after about a minute, it plays the start up sound followed immediately by the shutdown sound. It cycles this way forever (well at least for the 2 minutes that I could stand before hitting the reset button.

I am sure that I did something wrong, but I just can't think of what it could be. A clone shouldn't have changed anything on the source disks?

Inc

 

Cloning shouldn't change the source disk, but this is Acronis True Image.LOL. I don't use Raid, but once you get the booting corrected, what if you disconnected one of the SATA drives and tried the Clone to the IDE drive using the True Image bootable CD instead of from within Windows.
Did the problem affect BOTH Sata drives?

 

Update: Still having the problem, however when I plug the ide hard drive in and choose to boot from the Raid array, I can boot. I get numerous errors involving the svchost and the raid service. I have determined that it is booting with the raid array as the C: drive and my internal IDE as the H: drive.

Now this may seem strange and I should have fixed it a long time ago, but my normal operating system should be on the H: drive. Last time I was installing windows, I had added a card reader and was doing several things at once before I noticed that my os was installing with the drive letter H: Like I said, should have fixed it then. Now my os on the raid array is using c: and the ide is H: I decided to change the drive letter of the ide to something else, but cannot as it has the page file. I didn't think that would work anyways as I don't think you can change the drive letter of a running os.

Fortunately just booting from the IDE works and all of my data is secure. I think my next corse of action will be to unplug the ide and set it aside. Then figure out how to change the raid array so that it boots with the H: drive letter. Any ideas? It would have to be done with something like partition magic but would also have to be able to handle the raid array. I've never used PM or any other partitioning software so any suggestions would be extremely helpful. I'd also like to know how to stop this from happening again. Was this all because I used the H: drive as my OS / boot drive?

Inc

 

I am using Raid 0, which treats the two sata disks as one drive and alternates reading/writing between the two drives. While it nearly doubles the throughput, if one of the disks fails, everything is gone. Thanks for the suggestion though. The raid array needs the two disks to be able to work.

 

Fixed!

I had decided against using partition magic or other variants and chose to boot with the Acronis boot disk, do the "quiet acpi=off noapic" thing to get my usb disk containing the full back up to appear, then do a recovery from the usb disk to the raid array.

After selecting the mybackup.tib, it gave me the choice of partition H:, or the MBR and track 0. Smiling , I chose mbr and track 0. Within seconds my raid array is booting and showing up as the H: drive once again. All of my shortcuts are happy again. If anyone can shed some light on why this happened, or what I did, I would still appreciate it.

Inc

 

Hello Incog,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that when you booted with two identical system drives (RAID and cloned IDE), Windows became confused which drive should it boot from (BIOS settings only affect the order in which drives will be read for booting). This is the reason it's strongly recommended to disconnect one of the drives before first booting after cloning. Please also see this article for some details and advices.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov