Restored Image Not Bootable - How Do I Avoid This In Future?

Thread needs solution
truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
Forum Member
Posts: 24
Comments: 31

11.7.50058  After I made a differential backup I tried making changes to my hard disk. They did not work out.

I deleted my partitions and then proceeded to restore my two partitions from the differential backup I had created a few hours before.

The OS backed up was Windows XP Pro 32 bit. The controller is a Marvell 88SE9172. Disk size is 1 TB. SATA

After restore I was presented with a boot time error message,

"Hal.dll is missing or corrupt."

After trying numerous workarounds including copying hal.dll from another drive, my only working solution was to use the original XP disc, go into recovery console, and bootcfg /rebuild

I am very unnerved by this all. I do not know if it was because of the Marvell controller, or if it was because I use Paragon GPT Loader sometimes. I do not know why Acronis failed to give me a bootable restore.

I did notice in the restore log that it said that it could not find a bios number for the hard disk. It appeared to be 0 and the Acronis program executed a bootability fix and made the bios number 128.

What does that mean?

Can anyone figure out what happened and how I can avoid its reoccurance?

TIA

Sun, 06/25/2017 - 03:39
0 Users found this helpful
truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
Forum Member
Posts: 24
Comments: 31

I have done many experiments and I still have more to do.

This is what I have learned so far.

I deleted the partitions on the drive and installed Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Pro 64bit from my original DVD.

It installed without needing any supplemental drivers for the Marvell controller.

After adding a few needed programs i.e. my video driver, the AIK kit, etc., I installed Acronis Backup PC 11.7.50064

I then created an Acronis Recovery CD using Windows PE 3.0

NOTE: THE PROBLEM IN ACRONIS REQUIRING YOU TO USE AN EXTERNAL CD BURNING PROGRAM STILL EXISTS.

I then created a full backup of this setup, deleted the partitions, and then successfully restored the test setup.

So I know that the hardware is all functioning correctly.

NOTE: THE WINDOWS PE VERSION OF ACRONIS RECOVERY RUNS MUCH SLOWER, ABOUT ONE-HALF THE DISK SPEED, WHEN ACCESSING THE DRIVE ON THE MARVEL CONTROLLER, AS COMPARED TO THE LINUX VERSION'S SPEED WHEN I WAS USING EARLIER VERSIONS OF ACRONIS AND ALSO AS COMPARED TO WHEN I MADE MY DIFFERENTIAL BACKUP WITH 11.7.50058

It is possible that the driver in Windows 7 SP1 Pro 64 is not optimal for the Marvell controller, but I am not yet ready to try optimizing this.

Next, I deleted the disk partitions and restored my Windows XP SP3 Pro 32bit from the differential backup I had made with Acronis 11.7.50058. It restored WITHOUT the error messages about bios number, and it booted without any problem.

NOTE: I HAD SOME STRANGE DROPOUT IN MY SATA CONNECTION WHEN I WAS CHOOSING THE LOCATION OF THE IMAGE TO BE RECOVERED AND HAD TO RESTART THE RECOVERY CD.

 

So my next experiment will be to try restoring an image of Windows 7 from the same pc but on the intel controller to run on the Marvell controller using Universal Restore. I will post again after that.

 

I hope this info helps the next person who has a problem like this.

Wed, 06/28/2017 - 18:13