Cloned HD won't boot WinXP

Jerry:

What brand is your laptop? Compaq or Lenovo by chance? Do you know the BIOS disk geometry (is it 255-heads or 240-heads)?

Where were the two disks located when you did the clone? Is GRUB installed to the MBR?

Your symptom sounds like a disk geometry issue. When chainloading to the first partition the boot fails. This can happen if the geometry values stored in the partition's boot record are incorrect.

If this is the case you need to put the original (source) disk in an external USB enclosure and the new (target) disk in the laptop. To successfully clone you would boot from the Acronis recovery CD and clone from the external disk to the internal disk.

Well,

I read the Acronis kb article and retried by placing the new large drive in
the laptop, the old smaller disk in a usb enclosure and ran the
standalone acronis true image and did the clone.

I removed the usb drive before I tried a reboot.

When I rebooted nothing happened (I guess the boot info did
not get cloned.

I used a fedora rescue disk and installed grub in the mbr and rebooted.

Fedora boots fine but again WinXP *immediately* fails with the
"disk read error ctlr+alt+del to restart" message.

I am starting to think that the clone operation is doomed to failure...

Is there an alternate way of emplacing WinXP onto the new drive?

I was thinking about deleting the current XP partition, installing
a base XP system and maybe trying to restore some kind of backup...

Since I still have the original disk I could make a backup, but what
kind of backup? Would a restore screw up the booting process, etc...

My laptop is a DV4000 HP.

I need some advice :)

Jerry

Thanks

Jerry:

Since Fedora is running, could you post the output of:
sudo fdisk -l
and the contents of the file boot.ini from the root folder of your WinXP partition? Perhaps those will shed some light on the subject.

Ok,

Here are the contents of boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Here are the results of fdisk -l  ( the b device is  the original in the usb enclosure:

[root@linuxbox Desktop]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 620181 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x963fc22c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1      314523   158519560+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2          619753      620167      209160   88  Linux plaintext
/dev/sda3   *      318589      619752   151786656   83  Linux
/dev/sda4          314524      318588     2048760   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

Disk /dev/sdb: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf0661ab7

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        6068    48741178+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2           12135       12160      208845   88  Linux plaintext
/dev/sdb3   *        6324       12133    46668825   83  Linux
/dev/sdb4            6069        6323     2048287+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

In addition I dumped the initial block of both ntfs partitions via dd and

they where identical.

I don't have a clue as to why fedora boots but XP won't ( but I am not a windows widgethead, just a user.

Jerry:

boot.ini looks correct.

This, however, does not:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 620181 cylinders

sda is an internal disk, isn't it? How is it connected (IDE, SATA, eSATA, etc)? I would be very surprised that this is the correct geometry for an internal disk. Note that sdb, the external USB disk, is detected with the standard 255-head geometry. Are you positive that sda is the internal and sdb is the external USB disk?

If the two disk geometries are different then the dd dump of the first block of each NTFS partition should differ. The disk geometry is stored in this block and it should be different on the two disks if the output of fdisk is to be believed.

As for an explanation, Fedora can boot if the disk geometry is messed up because GRUB loads Fedora by file references. In other words, it locates the kernel file and the initial ram disk file by name, loads them, and boots. But Windows boots by chainloading (jumping) to the first sector of the partition, and from there the initial part of the Windows boot process will use the BIOS CHS parameters to locate files. If these parameters are incorrect then the boot process will fail.

The bigger question is why the laptop's new disk doesn't have the correct geometry after cloning. Which version of TI are you using? Are you booting to the Acronis recovery CD to do the clone? Which recovery version are you using; one made from the TrueImage program using the Bootable Media Builder application, or the ISOLINUX-based recovery CD that you downloaded from the Acronis web site? The latter is known to have an issue with some PCs and not detecting the disk geometry correctly.

Finally, I see that your Fedora partition is active. Is that where you have installed GRUB, or is GRUB installed to the MBR?

Thanks for the comments...

1) /dev/sda is the internal IDE (PATA) drive note the size :)
2) I went back and checked the initial blocks of sdb1 and sda1 and you
are correct, they differ in the range 020 and 060 (octal offsets from
the beginning of the blocks.
3) I am using the latest ATI Home. I was directed by Acronis to download
a standalone version since the one that I built from within Windows
seemed to have a lot of problems ( ie about 10 minutes to boot...)
I had upgraded to the latest version 'cuz I just bought a new i7 laptop :)
to supplement the older laptop that is causing the current problems...
I am using the standalone CD to to the cloning.
4) I think I still have the standalone tool that I built back in 2008. I might
try using the older version to see if I have better luck with it. I am not
sure of the version number (it is taking a very long time to log in so
it is not easy to check the acronis database...).
5) I have installed Grub in the MBR.

Hopefully by monday I will have tried enough stuff so the acronis help
desk can suggest some alternatives that might help...

Jerry

Edit: I also have Acronis True Image 9

Jerry LeVan wrote:

...I am using the latest ATI Home. I was directed by Acronis to download a standalone version since the one that I built from within Windows seemed to have a lot of problems ...

Jerry:

Now it all makes sense. The file that Acronis had you download is based on ISOLINUX and it has a very serious problem on some PCs. I think you've been bitten by this issue. See this Acronis KB article: http://forum.acronis.com/content/8134

If you still have your boot disk from TI9, give it a try. If you're lucky it will have enough hardware support for your new laptop. If not then you will either have to build a BartPE boot disk and try the clone from this environment, or you will have to ask Acronis Support to make you a special version of the TI 2010 recovery CD that is not based on ISOLINUX and has driver support for your laptop.

K0LO wrote:

Jerry LeVan wrote:

...I am using the latest ATI Home. I was directed by Acronis to download a standalone version since the one that I built from within Windows seemed to have a lot of problems ...

Jerry:

Now it all makes sense. The file that Acronis had you download is based on ISOLINUX and it has a very serious problem on some PCs. I think you've been bitten by this issue. See this Acronis KB article: http://forum.acronis.com/content/8134

If you still have your boot disk from TI9, give it a try. If you're lucky it will have enough hardware support for your new laptop. If not then you will either have to build a BartPE boot disk and try the clone from this environment, or you will have to ask Acronis Support to make you a special version of the TI 2010 recovery CD that is not based on ISOLINUX and has driver support for your laptop.

Yes that is exactly the error I am getting....

I am trying to clone using the Version 9 standalone ( It evidently won't
let me pour linux into a larger partition but I can always use my
Gpartd standalone disk to enlarge the linux partition...

It will be about another 40 minutes before the clone finishes, I am
keeping my fingers crossed.

Jerry

Yea!

I used the Acronis True Image 9 standalone cd to do the clone.

Since ATI 9 did not allow the fedora partition to grow I rebooted
with my Partd standalone CD and enlarged the Fedora partition
( the allocation is about 145GB for XP and 150GB for Fedora).

I then rebooted with the Fedora rescue disk and set grub into
the mbr.

I then booted the internal drive ( after removing the usb drive) and
choose the WinXP grub entry and it worked!!!

I then rebooted and choose the latest Fedora kernel to boot, and it worked!!!

The problem was evidently in the mal-configured geometry with the new
version the internal drive has the same number of heads (255) and
sectors/track ( 63) as the old smaller drive.

Does Acronis plan a fix for the problem?

Thanks for all of the help folks :)

Jerry

Jerry:

I hope that Acronis has a fix in mind. They thought that they were doing everyone a favor by offering a downloadable ISO file based on an alternate Linux loader (ISOLINUX) that appeared to have better driver support than their own loader (Acronis Loader). However, this geometry issue with ISOLINUX is a very serious problem that needs immediate attention.

Hello all,