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Cannot change disks with backup restore

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I want to move my C: drive to a new disk which is larger.  If I backup with Acronis 2014 to a USB drive and then restore to a new drive I get this message when booting the new drive "missing or corrupted file in Windows root System32\hal.dll.  I have tried cloning to the new drive with same result.  I have installed a brand new target drive also with the same result.

I have tried the bootrec options (fixmbr, etc.) and bootsect options on the targeted drive after restoring and still get the same result. I also tried taking a disk image with win7 but it won't restore it to the new drive.

Is there anything that will work?

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Roger, please ensure that you select to backup and restore ALL partitions, including any hidden partitions, especially the Windows 7 System Reserved partition.

I would also recommend doing a CHKDSK /F /R against the source drive before doing the backup to make sure that there are no bad sectors or file system problems.

Lastly, because you are in effect 'cloning' the source drive to your new bigger target drive, you need to ensure that you connect that new drive exactly where the source drive was connected, so that the Boot Configuration information matches the controller / port information stored from the working source drive.

One further comment, you haven't said what the drive sizes are, but if your target drive is larger than 2TB then it will be converted to GPT when you restore the image and this will then not boot if your BIOS only supports MBR partitions.

Steve

Thanks, my new drive is 1tb (both of the ones I have tried) the one I am cloning/backingup from is 500gb and I did run CHKDSK /F /R.  I am now suspecting that the drive I am trying to copy from has some corruption in the critical files area which allows it to boot but not be accurately copied from or cloned.  I ran SFC /scannow on the drive that I can boot and it stated that there are some files that could not be repaired, but I think did repair some files.

I figured out how to open the CBS log file and there is a lot of data there to wade through but I found some files that it said couldn't be repaired but they didn't look critical - i.e. desktop.init.  I think I have the new drive in the right position but I have both the new and the currently working drive on the system at the same time and I use the BIOS to boot the drive that I want. 

I am going to try to experiment some more - I will disconnect the currently operating drive so as not to confuse the system and use Windows Repair disk to run SFC /scannow on the drive that's failing to boot  If I have any success I will post here for the benefit of others who may encounter this problem.