Uttlerly baffled by this behaviour when I tried to boot my resotred image

Utterly baffled by this behaviour when I tried to boot my restored image

In order to help me with this problem you are going to need to be very familiar with Jumpers, Multi-Booting several versions of XP Pro, and preferably have good knowledge of Acronis True Image and the OS Selector contained in Disk Director. This is a difficult problem, that has taken many many hours of my time so far. I apologise for the length of the post, but I think you need to know all of what I have written.

I am having a big problem with my machine atm. It used to be very stable and ran 24/7. Then it started to lockup, the machine would totally freeze in Win XP Pro SP2. No keyboard or mouse input would be accepted. The machine would also freeze if booted from a CDROM into something like Acronis True Image.

I know that the HDDs are OK as they work perfectly well in another machine.
I know that the cables to the HDDs are OK, as I have used 2 other cables with the same results.
I also know that the power being supplied to the HDDs is not interupted for long as the drives are always spinning.
All forms of power management have been disabled during this testing phase.

The reasons for the lockups, I think, may be down to the following possible problems.
1) My KVM sending daft keyboard and mouse signals to the computer causing it to lockup regardless of what software the computer is running
2) My mobo is dying a slow and horrible death
3) My PSU is dying a slow death
4) May be a corrupt bias
5) Clutching at straws now.....

The PSU is over 400W Chieftec. The system is an Athlon XP 2500+, total component max draw of 200W

To help to try and diagnose what was going wrong with the machine I decided to try and restore a saved image of my machine. This was necessary as the machine happened to lockup while I was resizing a partition. The original machine setup is now toast.

The image that I am trying to restore used to be the 2nd partition of my primary drive. The first partition was also an install of XP Pro. The first OS partition was for gaming, the 2nd for serious stuff. Acronis Disk Director 9 was used to setup the OS Boot manager. Both partitions were visible to each other when the machine was running.

In order to restore the second partition's OS to the first partition of the HDD, the boot.ini had to be manually edited so that it pointed to partition 1 instead of partition 2. This image was then deployed to both a 120Gb and a 40Gb Seagate HDD. I then tried to get the damn thing to work with the following strange results. It is very important to note that these results are repeatable. I have used different PATA cables, 1 round 80 wire cable supporting cable select. 1 PATA 80 wire cable supporting cable select, and in desperation an old 40 wire cable.

After viewing the following results what suggestions do you have to help me fault diagnose my machine. As you will see from the results below I have spent some considerable amount of time trying to work out what is wrong with the damn thing.

During the testing only one HDD was present inside the machine at all times. In all cases the BIOS correctly detcted the HDD and proceeded to attempt to boot the machine, with differing resutls.

40Gb Seagate drive:
Jumper set to cable select – connected to end of cable (master) - error type 1
Jumper set to cable select – connected to middle of cable (slave) – works, boots OS menu, then the OS

No jumper connected to drive – connected to end of cable (master) – works, as above
No jumper connected to drive – connected to middle of cable (slave) – works, as above

Jumper to master position – connected to end of cable (master) – error type 1
Jumper to master position – connected to middle of cable (slave) – error type 1

120Gb Seagate drive:
Jumper set to cable select – connected to end of cable (master) – error type 1
Jumper set to cable select – connected to middle of cable (slave) – error type 2

No jumper connected to drive – connected to end of cable (master) – error type 2
No jumper connected to drive – connected to middle of cable (slave) – error type 2

Jumper to master position – connected to end of cable (master) – error type 1
Jumper to master position – connected to middle of cable (slave) – error type 1

Error type 1:
Boots to show OS selection menu, then produces a blank screen without error message

Error type 2:
Boots to show OS selection menu, then boots to just before where the Windows logon screen should appear.


I just cannot understand the above results at all. As far as I knew, the jumper settings determine how the mobo recognizes the HDDs. If they are properly recognized in the BIOS, then as far as I knew, that should be it. In all the above cases the drives are detected by the BIOS.

The OS will only boot if it is on the 40Gb drive, and under certain conditions. I cannot get the damn thing to work with the 120Gb HDD at all.

What do people think that I should do now?

 

I have just managed to try these drives in another machine. The results are basically the same. Given that I know the HDDs are OK, that must mean there is something wrong with the way the image was restored....

Obviously there is still something wrong with the original machine, therefore I am not attempting to use the image in that machine