PC won't boot after recovery of C drive
I have a Windows 10 Pro PC built in 2012, not new but still with a reasonable spec with an i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. Recently the screen would fill with rectangles and the PC would reboot. Thinking it might be the NVIDIA card I called PCS support and the suggestion was to try the motherboard's DVI port. However, this didn't help.
Ater some more fruitless investigation I decided to restore the C drive from my Acronis cloud backup. This proved harder than expected, not helped by two of their advisers who weren't clued up about recovery. Eventually the restore was one but the PC didn't boot up as the C drive isn't showing in the BIOS! I've now spent two days trying to resolved this, things done include:
- running chkdsk c: /f /r (many errors fixed)
- running dism.exe /Image:C:\ /Cleanup-Image /Restorehealth (got message "The restore operation completed successfully"
- running sfc /scannow (got message "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requestion operation")
In Diskpart, list disk gives this:
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
Disk 0 Online 111 GB 455 MB
Disk 1 Online 2794 GB 0 B *
Disk 2 Online 2794 GB 0 B *
Disk 3 Online 2794 GB 0 B *
Disk 4 Online 119 GB 87 GB
After doing sel disk 0, list partition gives this:
Partition ### Type Size Offset
Partition 1 Primary 95 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 Primary 110 GB 96 MB
Partition 3 Recovery 522 MB 110 GB
Here is what list volume gives.
Volume ### ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
Volume 0 J DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 H System Rese NTFS Partition 95 MB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 110 GB Healthy
Volume 3 D NTFS Partition 2794 GB Healthy
Volume 4 E NTFS Partition 2794 GB Healthy
Volume 5 F NTFS Partition 2794 GB Healthy
Volume 6 G Recovery FAT3 Partition 32 GB Healthy
Volume 7 I NTFS Partition 522 MB Healthy Hidden
I recognise Volume 0 and Volumes 1, 2 and 3 (WD drives) but not sure about the others.
Can anyone suggest what else I can do.
Roger, do you have any other backups of your PC other than the one stored in the Acronis Cloud?
If you only have the Cloud backup, then did you follow the steps shown in the ATI 2021 User Guide: Recovering your system from Acronis Cloud?
There are several points that you need to understand / perform before doing a system recovery:
Identify the BIOS mode used by Windows 10 - this will be either UEFI / GPT or else for older systems can be Legacy / MBR. This is easiest to check when you can boot to the Windows desktop where you can run the msinfo32 command and look at the BIOS mode value in the report this shows. Otherwise, you need to look at the partitions captured in your backup in the Cloud via the Dashboard and look at the smaller partition to see if this contains an EFI folder or not?
When I look in my own Cloud backups, I see a SYSTEM partition with an EFI folder for my UEFI / GPT boot laptop, and see a System Reserved partition without an EFI folder for my Legacy / MBR boot PC.
Once the BIOS boot mode has been identified, then the PC should have been booted from the Acronis Rescue Media using the same boot mode.
The next point, is that all other disk drives besides the OS drive should be either disconnected or removed before doing the recovery. This is to keep any recovery as simple as possible by limiting the choice of recovery target to only the OS drive, and protect any data stored on the extra drives that are present.
Finally, when looking at the BIOS boot settings, if Windows uses UEFI / GPT boot mode, then you need to have the 'Windows Boot Manager' shown as the boot device. If Windows is Legacy / MBR boot, then the boot device should be your OS disk drive.
With diskpart select disk 2 and post the result.
Thanks for the replies. Here's my answers..
1. I don't see a Windows Boot Manager, this is my boot menu.
P5: Pioneer BD-RW
Realtek Boot Agent
P3: WDC
P4: WDC
P1: WDC
P0: INTEL SSD (114473MB)
The three WDC drives store my data, the SSD is the C drive which has Windows 10 and is the one I'm struggling with.
If I try booting with there Realtek Boot Manager or SSD I get a message about failure to start and an error code of 0x0000001.
2. Cloud backup
If I look at the backup #1 file, I see three volumes:
(C:)
\device\harddiskvolum (has Windows RE fileas)
System Reserved
The Reserved volume has Boot and Recovery folders plus these files:
bootmgr
BOOTNXT
BOOTSECT.BAK
Recovery.txt
As there is no SYSTEM partition it looks as if the BIOS mode is MBR.
3. I reformatted my USB drive, recreated the Acronis boot media (WinPE-based media), did the recovery again (accepting all defaults). The PC still fails to boot. I've generated a system report which I'll send to Acronis.
Roger, thanks for the further information. I agree that your PC looks to be a Legacy / MBR boot machine, and therefore you should be selecting your P0: INTEL SSD (114473MB) as the boot device.
The Realtek Boot Agent looks to be used for booting from a network adapter when using a PXE server hosted on another device on the network.
I would suggest simplifying the PC temporarily by disconnecting the 3 WDC drives then trying to boot from the SSD to see if this either succeeds or else if other error messages are shown that would help diagnose what is happening?
Agree you are MBR boot method.
Also agree with Steve in disabling other boot options temporarily and if you have not need for the PXE boot option I would make that disabled permanently.
You might try booting into Windows Recovery environment, selecting Troubleshooting, Startup Repair and see if the issue can be fixed.