wierd issue after restoring partition

Just found this forum after buying trueimage 9 today, thanks for the resource.

I have a drive with 3 partitions, I wanted to move my 3rd partition to its own drive, its a windows XP partition that is optimized for audio work.

I used trueimage to create a backup of the entire partition and then I restored the partition to a new drive as partition 1. I modified boot.ini so windows would try and boot from the correct partition (instead of 3).

I installed the new drive in my machines as the primary drive, Windows starts up and boots, I heard audio so I know my drivers are installed. At the windows login screen I enter the administrator id and password, windows displays the 'loading your personal settings' dialog, but then I immediately hear the shutting down windows "jingle" and am brought back to the login screen. I tried this with one of the other user accounts in this XP install with the same results. If I type in the wrong password, windows correctly tells me the password is incorrect.

I rebooted to windows safe mode and got the same results.

Is it because I imaged a 3rd partition to a 1st partion and windows doesn't like being moved? My option right now it to re-install windows to the 1st partiion, all my software and settings, this is very laborous for an xp install specifically setup for audio work and the mean reason I purchased trueimage.

any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Grant

 

Sounds like Windows is looking for other files on the third partition. You fixed BOOT.INI, but there must be lots of Registry entries that are looking at the wrong partition.

You might consider creating a small first and second partition on the drive just to recreate the original situation and restoring the BOOT.INI to the original values. If that works, you have a workable system, and you can decide whether it's worth figuring out how to make it work with only one partition.

 

I encountered this same problem at work and for "almost" the same reason.
After cloning the windows 3rd partition and restoring it to the 1st partition
you MUST make the original windows installation on the 3rd partition disappear BEFORE you boot off the new 1st partition the first time.
If you do not do this you will end up with a windows installation that is
actually using files from BOTH partitions. Then when you subsequently
get rid of the windows install on the 3rd partition you end up with a system
that boots up but to which you cannot login.
When you boot the first time from the 1st partition, and the 3rd partition with the old windows on it is not present, the new install "adjusts" itself to the new partition you placed it on. Otherwise it will start on part1 and continue with part3.
To fix:
You will have to restore the image again to the 1st partition (because after booting the damage was done) then get rid of the 3rd partition or the windows on it. That is where it gets tricky for you since you will need some way to rename or delete the windows on partition 3. Problem is you cannot do that while running from that installation. You will need some 3rd party tools like BartPE or UBCD etc that lets you boot outside of the normal windows. If your drives are fat32 partitions you could also make a boot floppy and go in from DOS. I am theorizing that it "might" also be possible to create a boot floppy with format on it and format the 3rd partition.
No matter what you need to be extremely careful you don't make a mistake.
...I hope you still have the image available. Maybe someone else here knows another way to fix it but I was not able to on the system I was building short of what I have already described.
Good Luck.

 

PS.
another way might be to move the drive to another computer as a second drive and then you could get to the data on the third partition from that computer....I'm sure there are other scenarios too.

 

thanks for the reply guys.

1) I was moving the 3rd partition to the 1st partion on a NEW drive, so when I booted from the 1st partition on the new drive, the 3rd partition didn't exist at all as its was a new drive.

Acronis support recommended using the sysprep utility from microsoft that removes the machine specific stuff, typically when you move to new hardware, however I need a "hot" backup but if I have to use sysprep this makes it not so "hot"

I'd like to know the reason why moving the 3rd partition to a new drive as the 1st partition on a NEW drive would cause this.

I'm creating a bartpe disk as they have a guide for fixing the login issues, so I may try that later.

Grant.