TIEW: Non-System Disk or Disk Error After Restore

Hello Steven,

Thank you for your post. I will do my best to assist you.

From the description of the issue, it appears that the master boot record gets corrupted during the recovery process, although there is very little information about the reason why. However, you are correct to repair it using it the fixmbr and fixboot commands.

In order to troubleshoot this problem, would it be possible for your to perform a recovery and select just the partition. I am sure your system will be bootable, but we need this step to localize the issue.

If you are willing to troubleshoot even further, we can collect 1 set of reports from your working operating system and then 1 set of reports after you have restored the partition together with the master boot record, which would result in an unbootable system.

Can you also let me know which type of the bootable disk you were using.

Please let me know if you need additional assistance.

Thank you.

Before I try recovery again, I wanted to mentioned something else I discovered...

I have a 500 GB system drive. During the initial installation of Windows, I made the partition the maximum size that setup would allow. Even after choosing the maximum partition size, there was about 8 MB of space left over. After installation was complete, this 8 MB showed up in disk management at the end of the disk in the form of a tiny partition. I never did anything with it - I just left it there. After I performed the recovery mentioned above, this 8 MB of space is no longer there. The whole disk is one partition (see attachment).

Is this expected behavior? Is this possibly related to the issue I have?

Hello Steven!

Thank you for your comment and for sharing your concerns with us! I completely understand you and will do my best to shed some light to the situation.

Unfortunately without the recovery log it's hard to say for sure what exactly happened to that partition, but I assume that it got overwritten during the recovery and currectly this space is used in one of the partitions restored.

I seriously doubt that it's related to the issue you've faced. The most probable cause of the issue is that you performed MBR recovery.

MBR is responsible for booting from the correct partition, it's like an address for the letter. (You can find good explanation of MBR in this comment). Usually during the process of recovery MBR is assigned automatically, and restoring the one you've backed up can cause booting problems (like the one you had). Thus we advise to recover it only in case you need to switch booting partition or have several of them.

Recovery without MBR may resolve the issue, since the correct one will be autoassigned to the correct drive, and you will not have to repair it by means of Windows CD.

Please let me know in case you have any additions concerns or something's confusing you in my explanation- I will be glad to address every your question!

Thank you for cooperation!

I setup several different xPpro and Win7 on separate partitions using HyperOS. Having deleted HyperOS in favour of Acronis TI 11 for backups and restores I backed up a XP and a Win7 partition and successfully restored the XP to the previous Win7 partition.

In the process was much impressed with Acronis ! But on restarting now I get a Dos error message during startup ... 'Non-System disk - press any key ...'   On pressing any key the startup proceeds normally. So no serious problem except the irritation of having to monitor the startup carefully each time. I also have Acronis DD with OS Selector installed but I see no evidence of OS selector at startup only the Dos choice of XP or Win systems. Please advise.

Hello Bill,

Thank you for your post. I will definitely help you with this.

The error message that you receive is probably related to the fact that the information in the master boot record got corrupted somehow and points to a different location for booting your OS.

To make sure everything works without any problems and to get rid of the error message please perform the following operations:

1. Uninstall the Acronis OS Selector. Please check page 9 of our User Guide for instructions.

2. Perform the fixmbr command only. You can get the instructions from this Knowledge Base article.

You can then re-install the Acronis OS Selector and continue using it, you can refer to page 99 of the same User Guide for more information.

If there is anything else I can assist you with, please let me know.

Thank you.

1. Uninstall OS Selector ... your manual does not refer to this procedure but does refer to uninstalling partitions. Also Add/Remove programs does not list OS Selector.

So how to uninstall it ?

Bill D.

Hello Bill!

Thank you for your comment and for sharing your concern with us.

You can find the detailed instructions of OS Selector deactivation here.

Should you need anything else or have any further questions - feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience, we will be happy to help you!

Thank you!

I proved that the error message...'Non-System Disk...' at startup resulted from using Acronis to recover my Disk 1 MBR [my only HD]. And my attempt to use Win Recovery Console to repair Windows XP left me with an inability to startup any of 4 partitions. Chaos! since my Acronis backups were not therefore available from my External Drive.

I resorted to re-installing Windows and gradually recovering. Now  I need to be able to run OS Selector but when asked for the serial number my numbers are rejected. I have :

(information removed for privacy concerns)

can you supply a serial number which will work now & in the future.

PS.  I still have the irritating error message but will live with it rather than having another disaster.

Bill D.

Error... My My TD Suite is ver 11 as your records will show

Bill D.

Yana Savchenko
Re my comments above - I really do need a working serial number foe Disk Director quickly because I am now trying to resolve conflicts between wrong/inconsistent labelling of several partitions in Windows Computer Management. I don't want to have to resort to Partition Magic as I am aware of possible conflicts.

Bill Donohoe
Cheltenham, England

Yana Savchenko
Confusion resolved. Forgot I had upgraded DD10 to DD11. MY DD11 is working fine and SN is now registered.

Bill D.