TI 2011 Blinking Cursor after restore
Hello everyone,
I have been having a problem with doing a restore with TI 2011 w/plus pack. I had a friend who's old laptop died. I let her use one of my spare laptops so then she could still keep working as she is a web developer and needed to get back to work. She purchased a new laptop that is better laptop which is better then spare laptop. She wanted to keep the contents of the hard drive in the spare (we used her windows key on the spare machine to keep everything legal). I created an image of the disk on a USB hard drive so then I could restore onto her new laptop as it's a better laptop. I created a boot disk using the new plus pack items. I downloaded all the drivers from the laptops site to make sure I had all the correct drivers needed. These are the following steps I took.
I booted from the Media CD and got into the Acronis TI 2011 GUI.
I selected Restore My Disks and select the image from the USB hard drive.
I then checked Universal so I could install the drivers.
I selected all of Disk 3 which then selected all of the C: partition and the MBR Track 0.
I then selected the folder for all of the drivers.
I think selected where i wanted to restore the image too. I made sure that it was Prime, Active. I let TI2011 dude the auto allocation of the drive as the drive is much bigger than the spares hard drive.
I clicked finish.
I did not check use drive signature.
The process completed with no errors at all. I rebooted the box and got stuck on a blinking cursor just sitting there. I let it sit ther for over an hour. I repeated the following steps above and checked us drive signature and I had the same result. I do apologize for not having screenshots of the issue. If anyone could point me in the right direction for this that would be great.
Thanks
Matthew:
A blinking cursor usually means that there is no boot code on the disk, or that the PC is attempting to boot from the wrong disk or device.
First check BIOS setup to be sure that the primary hard disk is the intended boot device. If that doesn't work then repeat the restoration of only MBR and Track 0.
Mark,
Thanks for the quick response. I will give the MBR a try when I get home, the BIOS is setup to have the HDD as a prime drive I use select Boot Device to boot from the CD. I just had a server blow up at my job site and I'm trying to get that back up and running. One of my questions on this would be can I finish the restore if I just do the MBR? As she has a ton of web programs on the hard drive that would take her a long time to redownload and setup again. Thanks again for response
Matt
Matthew:
Recent versions of TI will either restore the entire disk at once, or only the selected partition(s). If you select partitions you then have to go back and restore the MBR as a second step. Perhaps that's what happened to you.
If you've already restored the C partition then you won't need to do that again. Restoring the boot code in the MBR only takes a second and, if that's what was missing, you'll be up and running in no time.
Mark:
Thanks again for the advice. I will give this a try. I've been pounding my head against the wall forever with this issue. I've always just done the whole image again and same problem. I will just go ahead and do the restore of the MBR. I will let you know the results of that so then the rest of the community can see the steps done.
Mark:
That didn't seem to work on reapplying the MBR to the hard drive. I am still having the same problem.
If you didn't actually check the BIOS boot order you probably should. Don't count on it not changing. You could also use the boot menu to select the hard drive directly.
Verify that the correct partition is Active. This may or may not be the Vista partition (it depends on how the system was configured).
Did you image all the partitions on the original drive? The fact that TI is letting you set a partition Active makes me doubt it. If it's an Entire Disk Image, TI won't let you make any changes to specific partitions.
Matt:
If MudCrab's suggestion doesn't work then let's see if we can figure out what's happening.
TI 2011 includes a read-only version of their Disk Editor, so I'd really be interested in seeing a picture of sector 0 on the restored disk. You will need a digital camera to take a photo of the screen since you'll need to run the recovery version of TI2011 from its CD. If you are willing to do this, proceed as follows:
1. Boot the laptop from the TI 2011 recovery CD
2. Go to the "Tools and Utilities" menu and scroll down to the bottom of the screen to find a hyperlink labeled "View the current state of your hard drives". Click on the link.
3. When the "Disks and Partitions" window opens it will show a graphical view of the disk's partition layout. If possible, take a picture of this screen and post it in your next reply.
4. Click on the "Disk" icon at the left side of the graphic to open the Disk Editor
5. Resize the window so that it shows all of Absolute Sector 0, from bytes 0000h to 01FFh, which will show a hex editor view of the MBR
6. Take a photo of this window and post it
These photos may provide enough information to determine what's going on.
My hunch is that the PC is not even trying to boot from the hard disk since you said that the laptop was new, so it presumably came with a Windows operating system installed; therefore it would have boot code already existing in the MBR. So even if you did not restore the MBR it should have ran the existing boot code and you would be seeing an error message instead of a blinking cursor. So I'm with MudCrab - I'll bet that the laptop isn't attempting to boot from the hard disk.
@MudCrab:
I have done the check in the BIOS and saw that the it shows the boot order as Main Hard Disk, CD-Rom, USB Stick, ETC. I have backed up the original HDD to an image but also have the laptops recovery software as it was brand new out of the box. So I am starting clean with the install as a blank partion. I had misread the the partition part with the selection. It reads Primary, But make active. I assume it would make it active as this will be the only partition on it. This is an entire disk image with recover sector by sector.
@Mark:
I will try and get some pictures of the MBR when it gets done with the reimage. I started it before your posts and it still has not finished my apologies for that one there. But if it doesn't work this time I will get some pictures of everything.
Thanks for all the help.
Matt
I posted a comment here http://forum.acronis.com/forum/6339 -- it got me working..
blinking cursor issue
Everyone thanks for the help. I'm sorry I haven't posted in here for awhile. I had to go TDY. Oh the fun of going to places I hate...lol. But I figured out my problem with what I was doing. I had taken the HDD from my spare laptop with the working copy of windows and just put the SATA drive into my home desktop computer and made a backup that way. After many many hours of blinking cursor and getting no where. I had my friend bring the laptop back over. I put the ATI 2011 CD into the laptop and made a backup from the machine itself. I then did the recover from the steps above and the new laptop is up and running like a champ. So I believe the image that I had created before was bad or something my desktop did to it made it not really work. So I'm hoping this will help someone else out if they are featuring the same problem.
Thanks again for all your help.
Matt