Help: Restored with Image - then... Error loading operating system - Acronis support slow, says could take 2 MONTHS to help me.

You may want to Google that error. I've never seen it before after a restore. What OS do you have?

If you still have the Backup Image, then your data is still in it and may yet be accessible. It may even be on the drive that wouldn't boot. Try connecting the non booting drive to another computer.

David:

The error message means that the disk is being detected incorrectly.

1. When you restored the image, where was the target disk located? In the primary hard disk location? In an external enclosure? Please describe how you did the restore operation.
2. Did you restore the image as "Active"?
3. Is your PC made by Compaq or Lenovo?
4. Which version of TI are you using?
5. Which operating system are you using?
6. If you still have a copy of the Acronis Linux report could you attach it to your next reply?

David I received message "Error loading operating system" today Apr 17 2010. This occurred on a boot up of XP SP3 after doing a partition resize operation using Acronis Disk Director Suite version 10.0 (build 2,288). I purchased and downloaded Acronis today because my old Power Quest Partition Magic 8.0 that I have relied on for many years refused to work properly on this XP system and theWD160GB drives on it.

I installed two 500GB Seagate drives to replace the 160GB disks. I did a Norton Ghost 14 computer image recovery onto one of the 500GB drives from a Norton 14 recovery point backup. I booted up several times more and XP worked fine each time. The recovered partition was still showing the original 149GB size of the old WD160GB drive. Because Partition Magic was unable to resize the partition, I used Acronis to resize the 149G partition to try and use most of the 500GB drive (I resized it to 464GB).

The resize operation appeared successful, it resized the partition to 465GB and I was pleased. As I was backing out of Acronis, before I could do anything else the Acronis screen went black and the machine booted on its own. On the way back up I got the "Error loading operating system”. I tried XP Recovery Console FIXMBR and FIXBOOT but it did not help. I did Bios enables disables of disks, I Goggled and searched –no real answers or help. I found this Acronis site and post.

There is much more detail to my problem then I have included in this post. But I wanted to tell you what area to look at to repair and what I did to get XP to boot up. Maybe it will help zero in on your problem.

To resolve the message I used the Norton Ghost 14 System Recovery Disk (SRD) CD to boot into the Norton SRD GUI menu. I then used SRD’s Partition Table Operations menu option to edit the XP’s disk partition table. Bottom line is that the Acronis resize operation replaced specific values in the partition table.

I already had Norton Ghost 14 PARTINFO partition reports of the disks geometry from Norton Ghost’s 14 PARTINFO utility so I knew what values are in the partition table. After the Acronis resize operation I ran the PARTINFO reports and I could verify what values had been changed by the resize operation.

The values changed were.
End Head was changed to 122 it was 254
End Sector was changed to 62 it was 63

I used the SRD boot CD GUI to put the old values back in and then I could boot up. I bet there are probably free tools that would do the same thing. Find a way to see a before and after printout or report of your partition table to see which values on your disk were altered.

Even though I got XP to boot I still have mixed resize results. XP Disk Manager shows the Disk 0 as resized to 465GB but the XP partition size is 149G. So far I cannot resize/expand the XP partition to use more of the disk.

I think the root problem is that I need to find a way to create a standard partition table without reinstalling XP. For example, my partition table on these XP disks has BEGIN HEAD of 32 but it should be 1. BEGIN SECTOR is 33 and should be 1. START SECTOR is 2048 but should be 63. I am looking for a tool(s) that will make my partition table a standard partition that disk utility vendor tools expect to see. I think this non standard partition could have caused the Acronis resize to have problems. I have not been able to edit my way to a standard table or find a tool so far.

Received "Error loading operating system" numerous more times after doing disk operations to increase free space or within the XP C:\ partition using Acronis. In each case I recovered from the boot error message by using the bootable Ghost SRD disk partition operations menu to correct the partition table entries. In most cases the two values I had to put back were the ending head to 254 and the ending sector value to 63. After putting the original values back I would reboot XP and the “Error loading operating system" goes away and I successfully reboot XP.

The really good news is that the original XP partition resize problem was finally resolved by doing a partition resize operation using Acronis, this time to REDUCE the size to about 275G from 465G- and the resize operation worked!!! With no reboot and no error messages at XP boot. The disk now had a 275G C:\ system partition with 142G of free space and a new empty 190G D:\ partition. Although not a optimal partition configuration it solved my problem to resize the 149/160GB drive and to increase the free space within the C:\ partition. Thank you Acronis! Glad I bought this product.

Also helpful in looking at this problem was a demo 3.5 version of a product called EASEUS for looking at the disk sectors in Hex. It also had a copy sector function that I did not use. It too had some problems with my disk geometry. Be careful not to reply yes to the initial message you get asking to correct the total number of sectors – I learned to reply no most of time. I think this looked like a decent program based on the demo. I am considering adding it to my tool kit.

I quit while I was ahead and handed the machine off to my son. It is up and running fine with the extra space. We will format and reinstall another operating system later to get rid of the non standard disk layout problem.

Rob:

Are you using the ISO image file that you download from your account on the Acronis web site; the one based on Isolinux? Or are you using the boot media that you create from the Acronis program using the Bootable Media Builder?

I did not - was not using the Acronis bootable media. I used the downloaded copy from web site.
Made bootable media have not used it yet.

Bob:

Another question - from your former posts it sounds like you were using Acronis Disk Director for these operations. Do you also have Acronis True Image? If so, which version?

Did not have, or use True Image. In my case I was using Ghost 14 imaging/restoring of recover points created from Ghost 14 backups.

Mark, in reading one of your older reply posts: “5011: DD 10 fails to resize”. I think you may have pointed my in the right direction. The bootable Ghost 14 SRD is a VISTA WinPE., and what I thought was a non standard partition on XP is a VISTA style partition with the 2048 offset! I must have created this type of partition somehow with a WinPE mini Vista.

I am researching this further for better understanding as I also have Win 7, Vista, Win2K8, VHD, BCDEDIT, imagex, WAIK etc so I better get up to speed before doing any more disk operation in these areas!

Rob:

It sounds like Ghost 14 is not detecting your disk geometry correctly, or like you say it is pre-creating a partition using Vista partitioning standards.

If you want an easy fix for your non-standard partition table then get a copy of Acronis True Image. Back up your disk with TI and then use DD to delete all of the partitions on the destination disk. Restore the image to the destination disk while booted to the Acronis recovery environment. TI will create new partition table entries that conform to XP standards (63-sector offset).

I am curious about how Disk Director was detecting your disk geometry. You should verify that it sees the disk as 255-heads. Start DD and right-click on the disk and choose "Properties" as shown below:

The drive's geometry will be shown on the properties dialog box like this:

I came across this thread whilst trying to troubleshoot this error on my own system.

For me the solution was found in my MOBO setup: the motherboard had removed the system drive from its boot order, and was trying to boot into a non-system drive. Changing the boot order in the MOBO setup took care of it.

Just thought I'd mention it in case it helps someone else.