Urgent Help Needed Computer Wont start

Hello,

I did an image backup to an external USB drive and chose manual settings. I selected the suggested settings When I restarted for the first time I still had the USB drive plugged in and got an error message saying MBR error. I restarted again with the external drive disconnected but my computer wont restart at all. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can start my computer.

I inserted a windows CD to try the MBR repair utility and a message says "This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record". I am not sure what this massage means. My computer has an 80 GB harddrive that has 3 x partitions.

Thank you

 

Hi "aussieinneed", welcome to the Forum

Before attempting to find a solution to your problem, will you please provide some additional information about the computer that won't start. In particular the following would be helpful :

• Year of manufacture
• How many hard disks
• Disk type (PATA or SATA)
• How are the disk(s) partitioned
• RAM size (e.g. 1024MB)
• Operating System and version (e.g. Windows XP Pro SP2 Build 2600)
• Acronis True Image version and build (e.g. ATI v9 Build 3121)

It would also be helpful if you could try to remember exactly what you did when you backed-up the system. For example:

• Did you use the "Image" or "Files & Folders" backup method
• Did you backup the disk or the partition
• Did you include the MBR

Can you also please advise if you created a bootable Acronis Linux CD before you created the backup. If you did have you tested whether you can boot from the CD and if the Linux OS can "see" your USB drive.

T.

 

aussieinneed,

In addition to Tabvla's questions, did you create an image or were you attempting to clone (copy) the internal HD to the external HD?

Do you have a Dell? Laptop or desktop?

 

Hello,

Thank you both so much for taking the time to reply to my problem.

I now realise how very little information I placed in my original message, sorry


The computer that wont start is only 3 months old, its a Compaq laptop with a single 80 GB hard drive, model is B1900. I think the hard drive inside is SATA. I had partitioned the drive into 3 separate drives (one of these is a system recovery 8 GB) and the others are about 35 GB each. I have upgraded the RAM to a 1024 + 512 . Operating system is XP Pro SP 2 , I am not sure which build. The Acronis I was using was Acronis True Image Home V9.

I used the image backup method, not the files & folders. I chose manual settings and just agreed with the suggested choices. I backed up the whole hard disk, i.e. 3 partitions. I am not sure if I included the MBR.

I was attempting to do a complate image copy of my harddrive in case mine failed, I thought I could just swap drives. I realise not I cant do that as the external one is an IDE drive.

Since I made my original post, I have plugged the external drive into another laptop and can see the contents of the 3 partitions. I used the Acronis recovery CD and tried to copy the image back to the original harddisk in my laptop from the external drive. It took 5 hours and appeared to be successful but when I tried to start the laptop it now says that no operating system is present.

I tried to boot from the external drive but it wont start and maybe the image is not a bootable one?

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated as I am away from home and dont even have my restore CD with me. I have also spent many long hours installing all my programs etc onto my new laptop and would like to avoid having to do this again if possible.

Thanks Again

 

Possibly the first question that needs to be answered is... "How important is the information that you had on the new Compaq?" If the answer is "Not very important", then the quickest way forward may be to simply rebuild the Compaq by formatting the disk and reinstalling Windows and your programs.

At that point you could then use the "Mount Image" function in ATI to virtually "mount" the "image" that you created of the Compaq and then, using normal Windows Explorer, you can "Copy & Paste" the data (not system or program) files and folders that you want from the external disk to the newly rebuilt Compaq.

Option 1
--------
If the above is a possible solution, and if you need further help to implement it then let us know.


Option 2
--------
If the above is not an acceptable solution then let us know and we will make every effort to rescue the Compaq from the image. But potentially that is a much longer process which will require some technical ability.

Let us know what you want to do

 

aussieinneed,

I'm still uncertain whether you did a clone or an image.

 

If you can do that I don't see how you can have an image as you need TI9 to explore the image - surely?
If you don't have the CD can you download a trial version of TI and create a CD with that? (I'm guessing you can do that with the trial version).
Good luck.
John

 

Greetings from Australia and thanks again for everyone's assistance.

I am away from home so did not have my restore CD's with me but there was a partition on the hard drive to restore from. I wasnt able to access the partition as you needed the restore CD's to access the partition.

Eventually I loaded a non genuine copy of XP onto the computer, changed the key with the Microsoft key changing tool to the proper keycode and loaded all my programs on from sctach again and did Windows updates.

This was a long process but luckily I was able to get all my data files from the backup on my external drive.

Thanks again for assistance provided.

 

Hi, aussieinneed

Normal message when using FIXMBR through the recovery console , see this old post of mine:- #2

Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Hi TheQuest,

Thanks for your message and link. I am sure this will come in useful so I have saved this to a pdf file in my "computer problen fixes" folder for the future.

Thanks Again

 

Hi, aussieinneed

Your very Welcome.

Take Care,
TheQuest