Cloned old disk to new drive - boot failure
Hi everyone.
I have an HP Pavillion m9500y with Vista 64bit. I got the hard drive failure imminent message, so I backed up my data, installed a new drive, ran disk clone through the bootable media disk I created with TI 2012. The clone said it was successful.
I looked at the new drive through the TI backup files to see if it cloned ok and it looks fine. The partitions are there and all the data seems to be there.
So, I disconnected my old drive (Seagate Barracuda 750gb) and have the new drive(Seagate Barracuda 3tb) in the primary position. Now it says "boot failure..please insert system disk." I ran the short self-test through bios and it passed.
I, then, tried using the HP recovery disks and it says "Non-system disk or disk error." They aren't faulty because I used them to recover my old drive before cloning and it worked properly.
This is the very short story of what I have been doing for the past few days and I am at a loss now. No clue what to do next.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
I know that the 3 tb drive is above what MBR can use, but it only shows that 2 tb is active right now. Yes I do have an external drive that I can backup to.
Once I do that, what should I do?
Forgot to add that the old disk was formatted using MBR.
My suggestion would be to do full disk backup and validation of your old drive using the Acronis Rescue Disk to your external drive. After that is complete, you can use the backup image to restore/recover to your new drive. After the backup is complete, place your new drive into your system, and boot to the Rescue Disk and recover from the image file (.tib) your created from your old drive located on the external.
You will have more options when doing a recovery this way. Be sure to use the tool in the rescue media "Add a new disk" to wipe the 3TB disk before beginning the restore. Be very careful to choose the correct drives when in the Rescue media. You can restore one partition at a time, but do so in the order they were in on the old drive. ie: restore first partition, then second, third, etc. (you do not have to reboot between each restore). When restoring the partitions, do not change the size of any partitions except the one Windows is installed on and/or a Data partition if you have one. The other partitions that you have on your system, such as the Windows system reserved and HP recovery/diags partitions should not be resized.
After restoring the partitions, be sure to restore the MRB/boot track and the disk signature. You will see these items/options during restore.
I suspect you still may have problems with the 3TB hard drive installed as the main bootable drive if your BIOS only sees it as a 2TB drive. When using drives larger than 2.2TB as the operating system/active/boot drive, UEFI firmware and GPT partitioning are required.
IF you want to use the 3 TB disk, you'll need to change in your BIOS to boot with EFI instead of MBR and then your new drive needs to be GPT layout instead of MBR. You hardware might or might not support such a setup.
Thank you so much everyone. I will try what you suggested and if that doesn't work, I might just have to buy another drive that is less than 3tb. I will do the backup/restore later today and let you know what happens.
One question - why would I still have issues using the 3tb as my boot disk if the computer only sees the 2tb right now? It's formatted as MBR so I don't know what the difference would be. In theory, wouldn't I be able to use the disk and then later allocate the rest of the space using TI? Just curious.
In theory, yes. You could use Windows to create a new partition on the remaining space if it can been seen in disk management. I wasn't suggesting that what you are attempting will not work, just that you may possibly run into some problems.