Won't boot after Acronis Drive Cleanser said it needed to reboot to wipe non-boot drive
So I was trying to get rid of a couple of drives and fired up Acronis True Image Home 11's Drive Cleanser (or whatever it is called) to wipte those drives. It said it needed to reboot in order to do it. I double and triple checked to make sure the drives being wiped were NOT the main/boot drive. The computer rebooted and a nice pretty black screen with:
MBR Error 3
I tried to use my copy of Acronis Disk Director boot media to install the OS selector so I could get it to boot, but it refuses, saying my primary/bootable partition is not a valid partition. I try to view the boot partition in Acronis (or anything else) and it shows up as "invalid". I tried to check the MBR and revert it using a rescue disk with "testdisk" and it says both the MBR and the backup MBR are bad.
I do not have the original Windows XP CDs to access the recovery console as I just moved 3,000 miles and all my stuff is in storage or being shipped.
When I do a Google search almost all the "MBR Error 3" results point to Acronis, but no one seems to have a great answer. (I do also have Rexco PerfectDisk on that computer, as some threads seemed to suggest the problem lies in the interaction between the two.)
I do not want to have lost all my data.
I have an Acronis backup of this machine which is old but presumably would have the MBR in it, is it possible to extract just the MBR from it? I assume more is now wrong, though, since the partition shows up as invalid.)
Thanks.
Paul:
I don't have a copy of TI 11 but the previous version, TI 10, allows restoration of just the MBR. I've done that many times. You can also do this with the newer versions. A screen shot from TI 2011 is below.
If Brian restored just the MBR from an old Acronis backup then he should be able to restore the boot code in the MBR, but that won't fix his other issue with a partition marked as corrupt. Perhaps you meant that you can't restore a corrupted partition table by restoring the MBR?
Mark,
I had written part of the post and then changed it. You can restore just the MBR, but (as you said) it won't restore the partition table.
Without knowing more details it's tough to say if the problem is an easy fix or if it's totally corrupted. If the drive didn't get wiped the partitions should still be there. A "reboot" wipe is something I would never do on a working system.
MudCrab, thanks for the response.
Long story short... I forgot that the drive was encrypted with TrueCrypt, so what happened was Acronis TrueImage apparently replaced the MBR and damaged the TrueCrypt key file header when it rebooted to do the Drive Cleanse on the other drives. Not remembering the encryption was there I was confused because the main partition was suddenly not recognized by TI or DD or anything. I wrongly assumed the partition had been damaged. Once I realized it was encrypted with TrueCrypt I got out the TrueCrypt rescue disk they made me build (thank goodness they don't let you skip through that step!) and was able to re-install the TrueImage bootloader and (when it wouldn't recognize my password) replace the TrueCrypt header.
Just FYI, apparently you can restore just the MBR. You choose recover, and drive, and then somewhere in there you can select just the MBR. (In my case it couldn't help, because of the encryption, but still good to know.)
Thanks for posting back. What happened makes a lot more sense now. One more reason to avoid "reboot" procedures.
I had no idea it was a "reboot" procedure. I mean, I saw it said "reboot" next to the drive in the UI, but I thought it meant that in the sense that maybe some file handles were still held to the drives so it would reboot to free up the file handles and then do it. I had no idea it meant it was going to reboot into a special mode or something. Lots of things (Windows Update, many app installs, etc. require reboots to finish, so I just thought it was like that.) Next time I'll know!
Thanks again.