Problems restoring from Backup
Hey all,
Been having some issues trying to restore one of my partitions from an external device.
I'm running Acronis True Image Home 2010 Plus Build 7160
I originally had a dual booting setup with xp and 7 on one boot disk. Recently I installed a new larger hard drive and attempted migrating xp over to the other disk via a recovery from my external. As recently as last night I ran a validation on all my archives so there doesn't seem to be any corruption. Problem is I've had a few false starts. The first one dumped me to a blue blank login with no password field and no way to ctrl alt del into windows. I attempted doing another restore. Everything seems to work right up to login time then I get a BSOD. Maybe it was wrong to put XP on a different disk than the other main os?
Now when I try to restore from inside the Acronis Loader at bootup I get a cannot read data message for my most recent backup of XP however I can still go through the recovery process for an older full archive. It's worth noting my more recent was done incrementally. I'm not sure about Acronis's consolidate feature but I was considering trying to find a way to merge the incremental with the full backup to get a recent full backup archive file but I get the feeling that is not possible for whatever reason. I would migrate all the incrementals along with the full backup to one folder on my internal but I just don't have the room to try that and I'm aware without the full backup the incrementals can't restore the image. Is there some way to merge the incrementals with the older full to make a more recent full archive?
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Aborted trying to merge any archives. After some trying (turned out my build was older on 7 than on xp where it was created) my most recent xp archive finally restored itself with a ntoskrnl.exe error upon booting.
I'm not quite following what you mean by setting it as active during the restore as I don't recall seeing an option but I did set it as active in disk management afterwards.
Would all the partitions of the dual boot system need to be on the same disk? Would restoring mbr+track 0 on disk 2 foul up booting with win 7 which has its own mbr on disk 1?
*update* restored the mbr and track to disk 2 xp seemed ok... went to log in and got the
plain blue login screen with no password field again. Stumped. I'm now assuming both dual boot os's need to be on the same disk.
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The easiest thing to do is to restore each partition where it was, and do one disk after the other.
If you had 2 partitions on 2 different disks and now want them on the same disk, you can do that, but do not restore the MBR and track 0 and use the Win 7 DVD to repair the startup (or use the bootrec command) to recreate the MBR, reset your dual boot.
Same thing if you have your 2 OS on the same disk, but now want to split them up.
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So in other words I should restore them both to disk 0 first and then copy the partition in question over to the respective disk? Or should I go ahead and try repairing the dual boot setup off the win 7 dvd as they are now with both OS's on different disks?
I sort of jumped the gun on restoring the mbr/track but I was still able to boot into 7.
I did try using the Win 7 Dvd to repair the startup and though it did identify the XP partition and say the repair worked I still got the blue impossible, formless login screen upon trying to access the XP OS. I'm beginning to think a file got corrupted/needs to be copied over.
How would I access this bootrec command? Perhaps I'll have better luck with that.
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So you are in good shape with the repair. I guess the blue screen is coming from some change you made. Maybe you move the BIOS settings from IDE to AHCI?
Do you have a code for the blue screen?
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My apologies for the delay in my post I had run chkdsk on C and let it run for quite awhile.
It's not a BSOD or Blue Screen of Death so there is no code. Sorry I didn't explain that properly the first time. It's just a bluish login or welcome screen only no way to interact with/get past it.
I'm not clear on what you mean by AHCI and how I could alter it back though when the BIOS posts everything appears to show up as IDE.
On the Windows XP login screen it's all blue with that little border to the sides and the logo in the middle where the password and user field should be. Except there's nothing. Just the Win XP logo and the background. I thought I could hit ctrl alt del twice and bring up task manager and somehow log in that way but I can't interact at all. Maybe I did something wrong when I was creating the backup for Windows XP after all was originally C.
There however is another variable that may be at play something I neglected to mention this version of XP was a system OEM install although I never touched or upgraded the mother board I DID xfer it from one hard drive to the other. Maybe it invalidated itself?
I've asked around about the problem and got directed here: http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.shtml If possible I could try running regedit for Win XP inside of Windows 7 OR I could try that boot disk fdisk /fixmbr trick though I'm kind of scared to.
So I'm going with the regedit attempt. In case the install got invalidated I'm going to attempt an in place upgrade or repair install of XP. If that fails I'm considering restoring XP along with 7 to their original places. If that fails the MBR trick and if that fails then I'm not sure only thing I could do is a clean install, convert the acronis image to a windows image then try to recover it within windows?
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OK. This is not a hardware issue. It rather looks like a corruption of the user profile on the XP machine, this is not an MBR issue. Can you boot in safe mode?
I would go directly to the repair install of XP.
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Sorry for the delay my file system on XP went RAW I'm running acronis restore again and this time going directly to trying safe mode and then repair mode. Waiting on C partition (re)recovery process in Acronis currently.
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Andrew,
Did you consider using VMware to run XP within Win7? You can use the VMWare converter to migrate your XP installation to a virtual machine and run it using VMware Player. That's free and easy.
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Wouldn't I have to allocate memory to do that? I've done it once about two years ago and I recall having to cut my memory in half and as I only have 2 gigs available it wouldn't leave me with much but with the success I'm having I'm starting to consider it.
After the partition restored itself I tried to boot on and rune safe mode which gave me a quick BSOD and a reboot. I then popped a Windows XP cd in to try a repair install despite seeing the correct volume it didn't see it as a Windows installation. Went to recovery console I saw the WINDOWS folder listed so I tried boocfg /rebuild after about a minute I got an error saying nothing detected and ran chkdsk /r, Then I tried bootcfg /rebuild again and nothing.... Odd how this time WINDOWS was on drive K instead of drive Z where I temporarily put it. And windows 7 which I have on drive E was on drive c according to the recovery logon. Nothing seems to be pointed to where I thought it would be.
I have a complete backup of the program folder and all my documents from XP so it's not like I've lost anything just seeing if I can get the image to boot properly.
Perhaps until everything is settled running a vm machine would be a quick way to fix things though.
I must have messed something up when I did the backup in Acronis. I can't figure out what though.
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Andrew,
At this point, there is the possibility that you bcd is screwed up. Check out this thread http://forum.acronis.com/forum/6758
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Also, running a virtual machine with XP can be achieved with 512MB of memory for the virtual machine. So you should have enough memory to run it.
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I'm going to restore my my original acronis backups of xp and 7 to their original positions run easy bcd set them back up and hope for the best.
Since I don't bank on just hope I tried cloning the partition of 7 as it is now to my other larger disk. Everything seemed ok the minute I tried starting it up I received a autochsk missing/skip then a BSOD. Panicking ran startup repair off the Win 7 dvd it failed saying there was no root problem. From your post above I'd wager there may be a mbr issue here somewhere. Perhaps two copies of the same MBR on both disks. I also tried several chkdsk /r and /p fixes since I received a false positive mft bitmap error on both in read mode. File integrity sfc scannow was run with no problems detected on both drives.
Nothing seems to be restorable except for an old recovery partition of xp.
As for the 512 megs...well it's something. Thank you for bearing with me so far.
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Well I'm done or just about done now.
Was trying to restore XP from the acronis boot loader last night got an error message about a write issue then had a hardware issue along the way with the disk power cable and lost the ability to simultaneously access both disks until I purchase a new power cable for my unit. I then tried the other still working power cable and it worked for awhile bu then I lost the ability to access the XP destination disk as I keep getting i/o errors on it at the end of the POST though the BIOS recognizes the disk in the settings, gparted won't detect the device so I can't make changes to the partitions. I had been running the file system recovery option wonder if that had something to do with it.... Oh well beyond the scope of this forum.
Thankfully the acronis backup/clone of Win7 worked like a charm and I was able to get that OS booted up to the larger HD so I'm still in the game. I'm going to try one last time to restore XP to this disk as C and if that doesn't work I'm going with VMware as you have suggested Pat. Thanks for everything so far.
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I did it! After much perseverance I got Win XP working on the new drive. Although my goal was to put the "legacy OS" on the original but I will take ANYTHING at this point. I guess both OS's should have been migrated here all along. Here's what I did to get everything working:
In Acronis I ran the Recovery one last time to a previously formated NTFS partition I had archive validate one last time and had the file system scanned for errors. Of course I wanted to do a repair in XP which I attempted but imagine to my surprise it was once again not giving me the option to rather than bootcfg /rebuild I went into Win 7 changed the drive letter back to C which I had forgotten to do in my rush AND I had changed the drive letter of the other OEM restore partition back to it's original letter as well. Used Easy BCD noticed the booth path was on Win7's partition instead of XP's but tried it anyway... it booted right up it took my password and I am writing this from my XP partition I cannot believe I finally succeeded. Too bad my other smaller HD seems to have an I/o error now but hopefully once I run disk utilities on it it will be fine (Gparted detects NOTHING on it)
In any event I am extremely pleased with Acronis True Image it did exactly what I wanted it to do.
Consider the problem solved. Is it possible to lock the thread? Thank you for your suggestions and guidance Pat.
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