Booting after an image restore

[delaney]

Hey, hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

At the moment I have Win7 installed on my C drive which is a 1.5TB Samsung, it has two partitions 200GB for the OS and programs and the rest for storage.
I bought a Momentus XT to replace the OS C: partition. I have tried a few programs to back-up (image) the C drive to a 3rd drive, unplug my C drive then reboot with the Win7 installation disc and run startup repair. Now at this point I get error's saying I can't run the image restore in this environment then it tells me to reboot from the disc, then basically do what I just did. So I'm stuck in a loop regarding the image restore.

Secondly I tried to use Acronis disk director suite to clone the C drive to the new XT drive, this completes successfully. I Unplug my C drive, leaving just the XT in, I boot up, I get a boot error and am told to run startup repair via the installation disc which I do, after doing so it boots past the windows sign, then Acronis does some final checks as it's about to show the login screen, I get blue screened for a split second then the computer reboots. I ran startup repair again, the startup repair is stuck on "attempting repairs" for 30+ mins.

So my questions are, where am I going wrong with the image restoration. I've tried saving the image backup to the new drive and to a spare drive. It refuses to restore from both these locations. The error message tells me to do what I did in the first place, and when I do it again it's the same result.

With directly cloning the drive, I have obvious boot problems, I can only assume this is to do with the OS thinking it's booting from drive C, what I'm confused about is, wouldn't it be labelled as drive C if the 1.5TB drive is unplugged?

Sorry for the long post, just giving all the information I think relevant.

Regards,

Delaney

 

[Jim_L9]

Was the Samsung drive setup for AHCI? Is the Momentus setup the same way?

 

[hang-the-9]

Are you imaging the full drive, or just the one partition? Are you keeping the orignal drive in the same SATA port? How are you booting to resotre the image?

You need to boot to an external media to resotre the disk, one that has access to the imaging program and the image it created. Then put the disk you want to put the image on on SATA1, restore the image on it. Should boot just fine unless you have some system files also on the second partition of the original drive. If you can't get this work, try cloning the entire drive, not just the partition.

 

[delaney]

Was the Samsung drive setup for AHCI? Is the Momentus setup the same way?

I don't believe it was. I'm not aware of setting it up.

Are you imaging the full drive, or just the one partition? Are you keeping the orignal drive in the same SATA port? How are you booting to resotre the image?

You need to boot to an external media to resotre the disk, one that has access to the imaging program and the image it created. Then put the disk you want to put the image on on SATA1, restore the image on it. Should boot just fine unless you have some system files also on the second partition of the original drive. If you can't get this work, try cloning the entire drive, not just the partition.

I imaged just the OS partition which is 200GB approx with 190GB used. I've just tried again using the windows backup utility and it's getting further than before, I can select the image to restore, however even though it is showing the Momentus XT on the list of drives available, it gives me the error "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found".

Basically what I've done, is put the image of C on a 3rd drive, that's in SATA port 3, unplugged the Samsung from port 1, left the XT in port 2, and tried to restore the image onto the XT. The POST is recognising the XT, I know the drive is working, it just seems Windows is being picky about something. I'll try moving the XT to sata port 1 and update.

Thanks for the replies guys.


Edit: Moving the XT to SATA port 1 had no effect, it's still giving me the "No disk that can be used for recovering the system disk can be found".
The XT is twice the size of the imaged partition, so that shouldn't be a problem. I can't really see any reason for it not to restore to the XT in that situation.

 

[delaney]

Something I didn't try when using Acronis was to put the XT in SATA port 1 after making the image. The whole blue screen thing threw me off with that one. I'll try that again now. The annoying thing is it takes 30mins each time to make an image then another 20 waiting for the repair environment to load from disk, makes this a slow process of trial and error. Oh well.

 

[hang-the-9]

Don't image and restore from withing Windows. Boot of an external Boot media (the imaging software shouold have options to make one of those), and do the work that way. You can't create a good image from within a working OS, or restore it properly on a drive loaded on an OS.

 

[delaney]

Making progress, I managed to clone the drive with Norton Ghost 15.0, it gives all the options for the MBR etc. Though when I get to the login screen I'm greeted with a temporary account. New problem to solve!

The other programs I used didn't image restore from within windows, but norton did, I guess that's why the user profile is corrupted, I'll see if I can get it to work via the recovery disk. There may be light at the end of the tunnel.

It probably would have been quicker to install a fresh copy of windows, but I refuse to be defeated...


EDIT: Got it working with Norton Ghost, took longer than other programs but working as expected. Also I figured out that the drive letter assignment was a problem.

 

[delaney]

Best answer selected by delaney.

 

[shitping]

Best answer selected by delaney.

n
nDo the following:
n
nBoot into safe mode and find how the system drive is lettered. Remember it.
n
nOpen Regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemMountedDevices
n
nIn the list of DosDevices, look for DosDevicesC: and change it to an unused letter (it may not exist, however and that is okay). This is only done so that you can rename the real system drive back to C if the letter C is used.
n
nThen find the DosDevices that matches the system drive letter found in the first step.
n
nChange that letter to C
n
nReboot and that should fix your problem
n
n/Karsten

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

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