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Cloned drive for a DOS system won't start.

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I cloned a very old drive in anticipation of it failing. Well it failed.

1) The machine is a ROM-DOS system with a 386 processor and the BIOS will only recognize very old hard drives.
2) The original clone was to a fairly new 40 GB drive just to keep the information safe. This drive will boot in a newer Pentium 4 machine so I thought I was safe.
3) After re-cloning to an eBay purchased 83MB drive, which is identical to the failed drive, the system will not boot. I suspect that the MBR is not being correctly installed. I have an error of non-system disk.
4) I have tried fdisk/MBR in DOS but I am not sure that this is doing anything.
5) Changing to a newer BIOS is not an option at this time since this is an embedded controller.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

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Greetings,
My recommendation. Instead of cloning, would have been to perform a full disk image backup. Then, restore these partitions to a new disk one at a time, and in the order they exist on the source disk. We recommend that you perform the operation using boot media. However, you don't appear to have this option now. Old disk is done for.

Its hard to say what the problem is for sure. You mentioned that the new drive will boot successfully in a new machine, but not when connected to the old controller. (Did I understand this correctly?)

Without the source disk for comparison, troubleshooting might be difficult. Normally in these situations, we would ask for an output from the Acronis Info Utility which allows us to review the disk structure, but you can't give that to us I fear.

That's right the drive will boot in a newer machine but not the older one. I did get over my problem though. I was able to restore the MBR only from an old DOS disk. This time the fdisk/MBR function worked. It then booted in the old machine. Thanks for the help though.