Can no longer boot from drive

[MDG]

A client of mine had a working win 2000 professional machine that needs some work - in order to be safe and to provide more capacity I did a disk clone onto a larger drive. The existing system has two drives. I used Acronix disk director (running from the CD in Linux) to clone the first drive [single partition] onto a new drive.

The new drive was then placed as the first drive and the old drive removed. The system would not boot - just a message about no drives. I put the original drive back, removed the new drive and it no longer booted.

However, I found if the machine is started with the win2000 install CD in place, then it starts and all is fine.

I played with recover console and fixmbr does not fix anything. Fixboot does not fix anything, but actually corrupted the drive - adding a lot of empty space at the start of the drive, and adding two new partitions, one cryptic and one labelled Novell.

I went back and recloned the old drive and for some reason this did not work quite as nicely as the first time, and gave me an NTLDR error, recovery console fixmbr -- took care of that, but I still need the win2k setup CD in the drive in order to boot.

 

[manojgj]

i never used Acronix , but i comfort with norton ghost that comes with Hirens bootcd.. i work fine for me with disk to disk & partition to partition & imaging a partition..

give a try with ghost..

 

[MDG]

I tried the original Ghost years ago, and it never worked for me. The later version of Ghost I believe is Partition Magic which I used to use for years. However, I found the when partiton magic changes cluster sizes, it introduces some problems that are generally not noticed, but using Windows Home Server to backup those partitions will result in backups that are corrupted. Therefore Partition Magic is a flawed product.

Having used Acronix to recover and rebuild those partitions correctly, I now trust Acronix and would never use Ghost.

But at this point, I don't need to rebuild or copy partitions - I need to fix the problem of booting.