Missing or corrupt System files after successful cloning of Windows XP
I am using Acronis True Image Home version 10.0 (build 4,942)
Thank you in advance for your help.
I say successful because everything booted and worked until I moved around some drives.
I am getting the following error after I successfully cloned my hard drive.
" Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.
\Windows\system32\config\system"
or sometimes I get this error:
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware."
Just to give you some background.
I have Windows XP that i have been running for a long time. I tried to clone my IDE 120 GB drive to a SATA 2 TB WD RE4 drive that is connected to a SATAII pci card. MY MB does not have any SATA connectors.
My system had 3 other IDE/sata drives. I wasn't sure this was going to work because the new RE4(2TB) drive was going to be a boot drive that was connected to a pci SATA controller card. I connected the 2TB drive and it showed up as volume 4. I used the Clone manual option so I can resize my disk. The cloning was successful. At the ending process Acronis told me to shut down the pc and unplug the original drive(120GB) before i reboot. I did that and to my surprise the pc booted with no problem to new 2TB drive that I had partitioned into C: 320GB D: 200GB and E: 1.4TB. Now I started moving all my data from the other drives to the 2TB drive. I formatted and deleted some of the other partitions on the other drives. I was going to use the drives in an external enclosure. When rebooted, this is when i received the above error. I believe it is because the drive moved from the HDD4 volume 4 position. I did change the Boot.ini file with no success. I tried using r in the recovery cd but it can not find the drive. When i plug my original drive (120GB) i boot no problem and are able to see the 2TB drive.
I wonder if you're able to run just the last part of Acronis where it does something to make the drive bootable again. It did it the first time with no issue.
Sorry about the long question, but I wanted to put as much information as possible.
Thank you for your help, Drew
I attached an report file.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| report.txt | 312.9 KB |
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Is your 2TB an advanced format drive? If yes, do a backup and restore rather than a clone.
Do your clone operation with the new disk at the target spot, and remove the current disk to place it somewhere else for the operation.
If you backup and restore, leave the original disk in its current spot, do the backup to an external disk, then remove the disk, place the new disk and restore.
Cloning or backup/restore should be done from the recovery CD.
Before you reboot the computer after the operation, be sure to remove any older system other disk from the computer until its boots and operates correctly.
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Thank you for your quick response.
I do believe that my new WD RE4 Enterprise drive is an AFD model because of its buffer size of 64MB.
After reading some threads here, I do realize that I did some processes incorrectly. But since Acornis did everything correctly and I was up and running I thought it was going to stay so I ended up moving all my data from the other 3 drive on to the 2TB drive, about 1TB worth of files. I was just wondering if any one would have any idea on how to fix the issue that i'm having since I already copied a terabyte of info on to it. I think this must be a pretty easy solution since everything ran fine until I moved the location of the drive.
Questions:
If Acronis made it run once is there a way just to run the last process without copy all the data over again?
And if I did follow your advice on backing up and restoring would it delete the 1TB of files that are already on the drive?
Thx, Drew
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This post is about Vista and AFD, not sure it will help: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/25558
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I have a similar situation with True Image Home 2009.
I have been creating clone backup drives on a regular basis since 2009. I am running an XP system and I backup to an external eSata hard drive on a BlacX drive docking station. I create clones by running True Image Home 2009 from a bootable CD and I am using the same hard drives that I have used for the past 4 years.
Now, all of a sudden, after performing a clone to the external drive I can no longer boot my internal hard drive. I receive an error message:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.
C:\Windows\system32\config\system"
I have to do a external drive to internal drive clone to restore my system.
I am perplexed as to why this error would show up for no apparent reason since I am using the same hard drives and disk cloning software I have been using for several years. And why would any changes be made to the source drive in the first place? Shouldn't cloning be a read-only operation on the source drive?
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First, let's be clear on terminology so we can understand what you're doing. Are you performing Clone or Backup? (they are two very different things)
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I am doing a clone (creating a disk image). I have performed this procedure successfully more than 150 times. After I receive a message from True Image Home that disk cloning was successful I log off from True Image Home and shut down my computer. Then I turn off the external hard drive before I restart my PC at which time I remove the True Image Home CD.
The disk cloning is apparently successful since I then do the procedure in reverse to restore windows to my internal hard drive.
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Irv K wrote:The disk cloning is apparently successful since I then do the procedure in reverse to restore windows to my internal hard drive.
I don't understand this step. Why would you need to do it in reverse. If you Cloned, then both disks would already be identical. Are you sure you're using Clone and not Backup?
If you are using Clone, I think you'd be better off using a full disk mode Backup.
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Apparently both disks are NOT identical. The process of doing a clone to the external drive clobbered the C:\Windows\system32\config\system file on the internal drive. At this point I cannot boot my machine using the internal drive. To restore function to my computer I have to boot from my True Image Home CD and clone the external drive back to the internal drive.
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I think you'd be better off using a full disk mode Backup. Clone is rarely required. Clone offers only one benefit: it saves you the step of restoring. Other than that, there are many advantages to using Backup rather than Clone, and there are risks of Clone that don't exist when using Backup.
Most users would be far better off using Backup and ignoring Clone.
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Irv K,
Are you booting up with the original disk and the clone disk attached to the system at the same time? That could explain why some changes happen to the original file, but I cannot explain it, or why it happens only now. I am sure though that you should NOT boot with the original and the clone attached to the system at the same time.
If you want to have both disks attached, you should do a disk image (a disk and partition backup). The resulting TIB file contains all the information needed to recreate the disk as it was. Disk Image + restore = clone
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