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Unable to restore

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I had installed an SSD as a boot drive and decided to upgrade to TI 2013 as part of the installaion process. I had already created a backup using my TI 8 boot cd of a basic Windows 7 64 bit install. I installed TI 2013 and created a new boot cd. Trying to boot from this new cd ended up with an error message along the lines of "No hard drives found" and the system freezes.

After a problem with Windows Update I decided to restore from TI 2013 running in Windows using the TI 8 backup. I selected the complete partiton (MBR, Recovery and Sytem partitions) and restarted to complete the restore. After the restore Windows would not start as a result of error 0xc0000225 "The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible". I tried a Startup Repair from my original Windows cd without success.

I then did a clean install of Windows (after using diskpart to clean the drive) installed TI 2013 and tried to restore just the System partition with the same result.

Where am I going wrong?

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It sounds like the probs all begin with the installation of the SSD. IF you could swap that out for a non-SSD drive and see if things work, that would narrow down the issue. If ssd is the issue then it's possible the boot disk doesn't recognize it and you'll need to contact TEch re a restore issue (should be no charge) and see if they can give you a diff iso to burn to CD that has a diff set of drivers.

Thanks for the reply. The SSD is the boot disk and there were no issues installing Windows to it. I have two other hard drives in the computer and an external usb drive to which I backup. I disconnected all drives apart from the SSD and external to restore: I then disconnected the external drive prior to attempting start up repair. It appears that the restore did not completely restore the drive.

Regards,
Mac.

Did you read p. 146, 7.5 Migrating your system from an HDD to an SSD in the Userguide?

http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/index.html

Scott,

I'm not sure that is pertinent as it was a clean install.

As to the TI 2013 boot cd problem, I didn't boot from it after I had used diskpart to clean it, I just rebooted the Windows CD and started yet another clean install. It may make a difference but having already lost hours re-installing I can't spare the time to try that again.

Regards,
Mac.

I wonder if the problem relates to the fact a TI 8 recovery CD was used to make an image of Windows 7. As TI 8 would have no idea of how to handle the boot manager for W8 or the new disk offset (if used on the new drive), it is quite posisble that it has restored the file correctly but has no way of knowing that the BCD is very sensitive as to where the booting files are put.

The other possibility is if the source drive comes from a brand name machine TI 8 might not be able to cope with some of the manufacturers hidden information in the MBR /partitions/BIOS and so the system won't boot properly. The Linux kernel on the recovery CD would have been updated for each version and build since TI 8.

This has been my experience

Finally I recovered my system. I installed a new 64bit Win7 and noted the boot partition is the 100MB just before the C partition. I kept this partition and then recovered my C partition using TI2010. I checked the recover MBR option which I believe is a mistake if the Win7 installation was Full and not Upgrade. The difference is the 100MB bootable partition only exists for Full installation. I don't think TI2010 is smart enough to figure out what kind of Win7 installation is running and whether it makes sense to try to recover the MBR for the C partition. Anyway the system still wouldn't boot and wouldn't repair. Then I loaded my copy of http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage and I used the GPartEd utility to view the drive partitions.  There I could see the boot flag was set on the C partition by TI2010.  I was able to move the boot flag to the 100MB partition and the system successfully booted afterwards.  Hopefully TI has learned a few things since and the TI2013 works better.

I suggest that TI2013 is reassigning the boot flag to the wrong partition.  It should be set on the 100MB partition for Full installs.  The CD I linked above is a very powerful Linux bootable CD.  Once you burn it properly, run it and type "Wizard."  then click on the GPartEd app at the lower left to view the drive partitions and note the location of the boot flag.  Good luck!

Jim

James ,

Thank you for taking time to post your results and solutions (as well as the link).

You can specify which partition is the sys or actitve partition when you restore.

Jim,

I think you may have hit the nail on the head. The first restore I attempted to restore the MBR and both the Reserved and System partitions without success. After cleaning the drive with diskpart and completing a clean basic install, I attempted to restore just the System partition, again without success. The message was slightly different the second time but ostensibly the same "Could not find the boot device" type of error.

Regards,
Mac.

You will usually find two partitions with a vista or w7 installation, the system partition with nearly all the OS program files and the hidden reserved partition with contains the boot manager (what was NTLDR under xp). You need both of these restored for the disk to boot and run windows.

It's possible to install vista or w7 into only one partition but it's considered less secure. Also, some OEMs will add a lot of their own installation files in the reserved partition.

Mac,
Yes I think our experience was similar. I believe the following but I am not an expert:

1) Win7 can be installed as a FULL or UPGRADE installation. If it's done as FULL then the 100MB bootable partition is created. If it's an UPGRADE (from Win XP) then the 100MB boot partition isn't created - the C drive contains the boot code.
2) I think TI isn't smart enough to know whether the C partition or the 100MB partition should contain the MBR. If the C drive is recovered with TI and the restore MBR option is checked then TI moves the boot flag to the C partition, resulting in an un-bootable drive for the case where the boot should have been in the 100MB partition. However if TI is used to recover the 100MB partition with the restore MBR option then the drive should be bootable. I was not able to verify this as I did not have a backup of the 100MB partition.

Bottom line is the user needs to be aware of the disk structure and restore accordingly.

On another note, I found that TI2010 would not properly restore my system over a network connection to my NAS and I had to place the restore files on a local USB drive. I hope this problem was corrected in a later version of TI.

If you partition your drive before installing, then you can install vista/w7 to a partition and it won't make or use a reserved partition.

Also note that you hdisk is probably partitioned as GUID rather than MBR. So when you restore things get a little bit stranger. I found it best to pick off each partition one by one and then when I hit proceed, ti had no prob making a bootable disk.