Norton Internet Security Broken after Restoring Disc Image
I've got an Asus 1201N netbook running Windows 7 Home Premium. I've been trying Windows 8 on this computer but it wasn't going well so I restored a Windows 7 image. The restore went fine, the computer restarted without trouble, the desktop loaded fine, but then after a few minutes the system completely locked up and a hard reboot was the only way to recover. Every subsequent startup is the same.
I tried restoring the image using both the Linux boot disc and a WinPE boot disc. I also tried recovering the single partition alone followed by the MBR, and also tried a full disc restore. All resulted in the same outcome. The system image (a disc image) was verified at the time of backup. I also ran some diagnostics on the external hdd the image was stored on and it is fine.
More on a whim than from any particular insight I booted into safe mode, uninstalled Norton Internet Security, rebooted into normal Windows, re-installed Norton and now all is well. It appears that Norton was damaged somehow during the restore process.
I've completed many system image backups and restores on this computer (and others) using TI 2011 and TI 2013 this is the first time after countless restores that I've had a problem.
Does anyone have any insight why Norton would get taken out by this restore?
Thanks
I've seen this happen on several (but not all) systems where the hard disk was replaced with a new/replacement disk, but was unable to pin point why this happens. The solution was, as you have seen, was to remove and re-install NIS. I've seen this happen with several backup/image products, including Norton's own Ghost product. Moving from a standard 512 byte/sector drive to an AF (Advance Format) 4096 KB/sector drive almost always causes this problem on Vista and Windows 7.
By any chance, do you recall if you chose to restore the "disk signature" during your restores?
I had the same thought as James. When restoring a disk image to a new drive, choose the "Restore Disk Signature" option. NIS may use disk signature to identify an installation location.
No, I didn't restore the disc signature since it is the same physical hard drive. Should I have? I guess there's no harm in doing so but I didn't think it was necessary since it's the same drive.
The odd thing is that I've gone back and forth a few times between Windows 7 & 8 on this machine. Every time I make the switch, I take a current system image of current OS so when/if I go back I've got the most up to date version of my system state. Every previous time I've made the switch everything was fine (going to Win7 & Win8). I'm pretty sure I didn't restore the disc signature the other times either.
But, James & tuttle, you raise an interesting point...
The issue I was having with Win8 was coming out of hibernation. The OS ran fine but when the computer came out of hibernation there was a problem with the BIOS handing control back to the OS; only +/- 700 MB of the 4 GB RAM installed would be recognized and Windows would choke on the process. The computer would reboot and Windows would restart rather than resume from hibernation. I would also have to enter the BIOS to reset my settings so the RAM would get properly recognized (this doesn't happen with Win7 so I'm pretty sure it's a Win8 problem and not a hardware problem). Maybe something got corrupted or changed on the hdd from the Win8 boot process that changed things on the hdd. Just sort of thinking out loud here.
Thanks for you time and suggestions.
Darryl
Pat, here's the disc management screen shot.
