booted with two HD same NT signature How to restore MBR
I cloned to a target drive with copy NT Signature a month ago. I inadvertently booted with both source and 1 month old target drive active. Windows must have found the identical drives and changed the MBR in the SOURCE has windows will not boot from it with a message to repair windows. My suspicion is the drive data got reassigned on the source drive. The old target clone does boot up.
How can I restore the MBR on the source drive? Other options?
Merry Christmas to all.
I got almost the same problem:
Disk A is corrupted.
Disk B is cloned from Disk A (source) with NT signature.
I intend to revive disk A by cloning it again from Disk B.
So I use Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 to format Disk A. (Disk B was removed from the machine at this point)
Then I plugged both Disks A & B back to the machine for cloning, thinking that Disk A has been formatted, it should not affect the NT signature of Disk B.
To my surprise, Disk B now cannot boot up.
Can the NT signature of Disk A (after being formated) still affect Disk B?
How can I restore the MBR of Disk B, and hence make Disk B bootable again?
Ken:
Connect only Disk B to your PC, boot from the Acronis recovery CD and check to see if the correct partition on the disk is set as Active. Also, use DD 11 to check the drive letter assignments - Windows probably made changes to the disk when you booted with two disks having identical NT signatures.
Which version of Windows? When you say "cannot boot up", how far in the boot process does the machine get and what error messages do you see?
Hi Mark,
Thank you very much for the reply.
I've checked the partition on Disk B as per your advice, the partition allocation is correct.
I've also read another associated thread "#8484: need help with Copy NT signature (Eugene Martin)". You mentioned that "..... After you have booted once from the clone, reattach the source disk and then you can format it to do with as you please." In fact Disk B had been powered up and tested fully functioning immediately after it was cloned. It was then put as a standby disk and Disk A was put back to use until recently it was corrupted.
If I had booted once from the clone, formatting Disk A and then cloning it from Disk B (without NT signature) shouldn't had corrupted the MBR, right?
I am using Windows 2000 Server. The machine started from the boot-up screen and halfway the typical blue error screen pops up with error msg:
"STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot read the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupted, absent or not writable.
Beginning dump of physical memory to disk: (counting from 1 until 99 and then computer reboot and repeats the entire process)".
IS there anything that I amissed and mine is actually not an NT signature problem?
Really appreciate your precious time and expert advice.
Ken:
It does sound like the NT Signature on the disk was changed. This isn't an MBR corruption issue, it's just that the partition references stored in the registry are now incorrect since they refer to the old NT Signature. As a result, Windows will reassign drive letters when you boot from the disk. Your Windows 2000 Server's main partition probably had drive letter C before, correct? It probably has some different letter assigned now.
If so you should be able to boot the PC from the Acronis DD 11 CD and assign drive letter C to the Windows 2000 Server partition. Do this with only disk B attached to the PC. Then see if it will boot correctly.