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System disk recovery

Thread needs solution

I've been reading through the forum but can't find the reason my recovery is failing.

Background: Lost the C: drive on an old 2008 Win 7 system. Have a backup on a NAS device.

Recovery process: On another Win system w/Acronis 2015, plugged in an SSD through a USB adapter. Used Acronis to recover to that SSD. Plugged it into the dead system. The BIOS sees the disk, but it's not bootable.

Not sure what the problem is. Acronis forced a GPT vs MBR format on the SSD. Presume my original drive was MBR. Would there be something in the BIOS I have to change? Are there more steps to make the SSD bootable? I'm lost at this point.

Thanks for any help

0 Users found this helpful

The disk needs to remain MBR. You can use the Diskpart tool to convert one to the other.

If, after making sure that you have an MBR disk, the restore doesn't boot, there can be different explanations:
- you are trying to restore only C:\, but you need to restore all the partitions instead, in particular the System Reserved Partition
- your backup doesn't contain certain partition or information to restore properly a bootable system. Try to do a full disk backup of all partitions including the hidden ones.

If the system remains unbootable after all this, you can try to fix the startup of the computer by booting on the Windows installation DVD.