Recovery with Identical(?) Hardware: Blinking Cursor
Hello,
New to this, but would love some assistance. I have Acronis True Image WD edition. I have a netbook that I sent in for a screen repair, which resulted in a new screen. Everything else in the netbook is identical so I'm assuming that there have been no hardware changes that would concern Windows? I also have Windows 7 Professional installed. I ran a system recovery of all partitions to the only HDD in the netbook from an external drive. From what I saw, the process proceeded fine, until eventually there was only a blinking cursor on a black screen. Now when I reboot I can get into the bios, but not past the blinking cursor which appears immediately after the bios screen.
I've looked at other forum threads and this seems to generally only happen when someone is recovering to a new computer/HDD/etc. and the system cannot identify the new hardware. This shouldn't be the case here should it?
I'm not really sure how to proceed. My next thought was to try to boot from the usb drive using the Acronis bootable media, but figured I would ask on here and see if anyone knows how to fix this for sure.
Any thoughts/recommendations would be great!
Thanks so much.
marek
That's great advice, thanks Duncan. I'll try to see if I can find out how to set the boot flag in Acronis.
The booting partition needs to be set Active. In Windows 7 this is usually either the System Reserved partition (if it exists) or the Windows partition. You should be able to set it when you restore the partition. Otherwise, you can use a partitioning program and change it.
Also, check the BIOS and verify the drive is configured to boot. Sometimes the boot order gets messed/corrupted and it tries to boot the wrong drive/device.
Thanks MudCrab. So are you saying that within Acronis I should be able to set the booting partition to Active, prior to running the recovery? I will try to see what I can find with respect to the System Reserved partition. Cheers!
One more question: should I still be able to boot from the bootable media or will I need to do something else altogether?
When you restore a Primary partition you can select to restore it Active. You can't use TI to just toggle the active status (a partitioning program will do this).
You should still be able to boot from the TI media. Just make sure the CD or flash drive is before the hard drive in the boot order (or use the BIOS Boot Menu to boot it directly).
If you can download a copy of gpartd live cd and burn it you can boot it and change the boot flag without affecting the data on the partition. In effect what I had to do after I forgot to do it when I copied to my replacement drive.
Duncan
Okay so that makes sense, you two are great. The only problem is that this is a netbook so there is no CD drive... it looks like I can set it up on my USB stick. Hopefully this works and I'll be able to boot it.
Is it not weird that this cannot be done in TI? It would seem that this would be a pretty common problem no?
Thanks again to the two of you. I will report back to let you know how it works.
So I went in with the bootable USB this evening and found out that for whatever reason, the recovery I ran last night only formatted the drive. It was completely free and unpartitioned. I was then able to run the recovery (either again, or continued the process?) and everything installed and is working perfectly. Thanks for all your help.