windows won't work after restore

ok, with jumpers set to CS, and doing both drives, I tried both combinations of harddrives on each end of the cable. Same results as before, in that the BIOS sees them, and starts the boot process, but it hands with the windows login screen-ish step, just as before. I do sometimes see an "INITIALIZECOMMAND 0c000003a" error message flash briefly.

Using each harddrive in turn, one harddrive is recognized as a harddrive, but I got an "unable to boot" error message. I tried it again later on in my series of tries, and it still recognized as a harddrive, but I didn't get to the "unable to boot" message. This is how its been - nothing seems consistent, so I'm reduced to being a monkey, trying a zillion things and hoping one works eventually.

The other hardrive is never recognized as a hardrive when booted by itself, so of course we never get anywhere.

Should I shoot it, or use it as a boat anchor?

 

Does the BIOS give you the option to Disable or turn off one of the drive connectors? My slightly older Dell 8100 had a similar problem. If you have both connectors (master/slave) turned on (AUTO, for example) and only had one drive connected, the computer wouldn't boot properly.

 

sadly, nope, no such option.

 

OK. Weird.

With both HDs connected and the one with the 30 MB Dell partition on the end of the cable as "Master", boot from the BartPE CD and let us know the contents of boot.ini. If it is the same as you posted before, change it to the below and save it.

[boot loader]
default = multi(0) disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="HOME EDITION"

What is the error now when you try to boot?

 

how do I tell which has the 30mb dell partition? is there some disk ID I can correlate from the bartpe output to the physical drive? or with CS set on will "disk 0" be at the end of the cable (or woudl that be disk 1)?

 

Good question. If you have a Drive Snapshot program in BartPE under Programs, open it. It should be there by default. Click Backup Disk To File, At the bottom of the Drive Snapshot window is a graphic. It should show the 30 MB partition. Is it HD 1 or 2? If it is HD 2, shut down and change the HDs around. We want the 30 MB partition to be on HD 1 in Drive Snapshot.

Otherwise, open the A43 File Management Utility. Could you let us know your drives? I have
Floppy A:
RAMDisk B:
WinXP C:
a few other drives D: E:
CD Drive F:
BartPE X:

WinXP contains my boot.ini for the first HD. It is the one for you to edit. The boot.ini in the C: drive. Record what it contains before you do the edit I described.

But, look in your other partitions, D: E: if you have them. Is there another boot.ini? Leave it alone.

What we are trying to do is get a correct boot.ini. We will probably still have to correct freezing at the Welcome Screen but if we get a Welcome Screen we are almost home.

 

If Drive Snapshot doesn't work from your BartPE, download snapshot.exe from here...

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/down.htm

Copy snapshot.exe to a USB flash drive. With the flash drive connected, boot into BartPE, open the A43 app, navigate to the flash drive and double click snapshot.exe.

PS If you use this method the flash drive will be HD 1 and your other two HDs will be HD 2 and HD 3.

 

millervt,

Any news for us?

 

Hello ToyMaker,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

Contact Acronis support and submit technical request using this link or contact us via Live Chat

Describe the issue in details and attach the following info to your request:

- Download Acronis Report utility from
http://download.acronis.com/support/AcronisReport.exe

- Run Acronis Report utility and select the "Create bootable floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the floppy drive and proceed with creating the bootable diskette;
- Boot the computer under consideration from this diskette and wait for report creation process to complete;
- Send us the report.txt file from the floppy disk. Please compress the Acronis Report output file into an archive (e.g. with WinZip) and attach to your message by browsing for the archive.

This would provide us with detailed information on the hard disk partition structure.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev