Restore fails

Help, I'm going slow mad.

Jim, sorry to hear of your problem with doing a restore.

Please can you provide more details of exactly what steps you have taken, how you are doing the restore, what you are restoring, what version of Windows OS is involved etc?

NTLOADER is missing is normally associated with older versions of Windows such as XP and could be as simple as having the incorrect boot order in your BIOS settings, or else may indicate that you have not restored all required (hidden) partitions?

NTloader may show up if the boot order is not correct in the bios anymore either.

Double check your bios boot order to make sure that after the restore, it is still listing the hard drive as the first option. Otherwise, it may be trying to boot to something else. 

We're assuming your backup included the entire hard drive and all paritions originally - not just the C drive parition, which would not give you a bootable OS upon restore. Screenshots of your restore process (cell phone camera) as you're going throught the process would help.  Start by checking the bios boot order after the recovery though. 

I'm trying another restore right now because I think I may have found the problem.

Acronis shows me 2 drive plus an MBR for that disk. The first one it lists is a 25M drive listed as D:SAM and flagged as primary, active.

The second drive is the C:BOOT drive and is listed a primary (but not active).

The third item is the MBR for disk 4, which is the drive where the backups are (it's plugged in to SATA 4 port).

I noticed that the selection screen lets you change properties of the drive so I set D:SAM to primary (comes up as primary,active).

I then changed the C:BOOT drive to primary, active.

And the MBR as a logical.

We'll see how that works.

The physical drive in the SATA 1 port is an SSD.

All the others are standard hard drives.

Right now it says there's 4 minutes left in the restore but I'm not sure how accurate that is because it said the whole job would take 8 minues and that was half-an-our ago.

I'll post again when it's done and let you know if it worked.

Oh, I forgot to say that, yes, the whole disk was copied to the back up. So everything should be there.

Jim, if your primary OS boot drive is the SSD then it is only the partitions on that drive that should be involved here, any partitions on your other drives should not be relevant provided that your BIOS boot priority is set correctly.

On most modern systems you should have the Windows Boot Loader as the main boot device in BIOS, and this should be coming from the SSD drive.

Screen shots of what you are seeing would help us to better understand what options you have here?

Okay, the last attempt failed.

I'm only restoring what was on the disk origianly. I'm not sure why it's listing the Z:SAM and the MBR.

I don't recall seeing that the last time I restored that disk.

The computer is(was) running Windows 10. And been restored previously.

I'll try it again, taking screen shots as I go.

Well, the last attempt failed but I did take screen shots throughout the session. I've attached them in a ZIP file.

Jim, I have browsed through your screen shots but cannot see anything obvious that is wrong apart from the size of the smaller partition (23GB but with only 470MB used) so wonder whether this is an EFI partition and if so, are you booting the Acronis Rescue Media in EFI mode?

See post: 128057: [Tutorial] How to recover an entire disk backup that shows you how a similar restore looked when I created that tutorial for other users.

It's not listed as EFI in the bios.

In any case the computer has developed some other problems and will be going into the shop monday.

This all started with the computer losing all power part way through an upgrade (an automatic one from Norton) because the Uninterruptil power supply that was supplying the power decided to quit working. And now it won't start up properly and when it does start there's no video output.

I think it's cursed as sometime during all this one of the data drives lost it's directory.

So we'll just have to wait and see if it survives the trip to the "doctor."

Thanks for your help. And I will check out that tutorial.

Jim, hope the repair shop can sort out the various problems you are seeing with your computer - losing power in the middle of any upgrade can be a nightmare, but especially with security software because of the deep hooks they have down into the OS kernel files.

I just hope it doesn't require a new motherboard. I hate having to reinstall everything, especially when all the programs are in TIB.

I looked over the tutorial. The only difference between that and what I did is the labeling on step 6. For some reason it shows the disk numer as 4. In step 5 I select drive 1 for the destination, which is where that drive is now connected. I did some rearanging of the phyical locations. The drive are now in numerical order in the stack with drive 1 now connected to SATA port 1.

I can't imagine that that would make a difference. <shrug> We'll see what we see when I get the machine back.

Thanks again for your time.

Jim wrote:

I did some rearanging of the phyical locations. The drive are now in numerical order in the stack with drive 1 now connected to SATA port 1.

Jim, this change can make a significant difference as the location of the boot drive / OS is stored in the Boot Configuration Data which in turn references the SATA controller and port location of the boot drive.

So if I put that drive back on SATA 4 I should be able to do the restore? Then move the drive to SATA 1, were I want it, then immediately start a new backup? So that's what I'll do when the beast comes home from repair.

Somehow makes sense. And that drive would have gotten a new update over night if the UPS hadn't died.

And I'll bet it tried to restore to the drive in slot 4 even tho I had told slot 1. That would explain the disappearance of some data. Damn!

Well, I guess we live and learn. And I won't make that mistake again.

Thank you.

Jim, be careful about moving your drives - make sure you know exactly where each drive is connected for when the computer is working correctly.  

I would suggest removing any extra drives before trying to move the OS boot drive, i.e. if you have 4 drives then remove 3 of these leaving only the boot drive and check that it still boots correctly on its own.  If all is still OK, then try moving that single drive without putting any of the other drives back.  You may need to check your BIOS settings also represent where the boot drive is moved to.  Make notes as you go or take some images with a camera that you can refer to (with everything clearly marked as far as possible).

Thanks, I know that. I even have each drive tagged with it's ID and where it connects. It's just that I thought I restore even if the drive was in a different SATA port. Now I know better.

I learned, the hard way, about disconnecting all of the drives except the backup drive and boot drive.

Thanks again for the help.

The saga continues. The computer is back from repair but I'm still not able to restore the boot drive. Acronis puts the small partition (SAM) as C:SAM then adds a partition which should be C:BOOT as D:Boot. Even making Acronis mark that as active makes no difference. So it looks like I'm left with nothing to do but reinstall from scratch. <grumble, grumble>

Jim, sorry but I have not heard of a SAM partition or even a BOOT one, so not sure what these actually relate to?

All I can suggest at this point / how I would proceed would be as follows:

This assumes that you have a good backup of your Windows 10 OS partition!

If your computer has come back with a working OS install, then do a full disk & partitions backup before making any changes, so that you can get back to this starting point.  If it has come back working but with nothing installed, then continue.

Do a basic 'vanilla' install of Windows 10 on to the main OS drive and let this reformat / repartition the drive as needed to create all required partitions.

Check that Windows 10 is working then make a further full disk & partitions backup of this vanilla install.

Boot from your Acronis Rescue Media and check that you can see the new Windows 10 drive and its partitions.  If all looks OK, then check that you can see the drive which has your backup of the old Windows 10 installation (from before all these issues arose).

If all looks good from the Rescue Media, then restore just the old Windows 10 OS partition on its own - do not restore any other partitions and do not restore the MBR or Track 0.  Once the restore has been done successfully, then shutdown, remove the Rescue Media and any external drive(s) then check that the restored Windows 10 OS will boot OK.