Salta al contenuto principale

Restore of partition backup corrupts windows 7

Thread needs solution

I backed up both partitions on my single internal hard drive using True Image Home 2011 (full partition backup but not disk image) to an external harddrive. This is a Dell inspirion and backup included the hidden factory restore partition. I then restored the operating system partition from within Windows but the restore broke W7. W7 attempted to fix it self on the next boot but could not. I then repeated the restore, booting from a DVD drive that has a copy of the Acronis bootable disk. Restore "succeeded" but on boot W7 now flashes a message that boot.ini is corrupt or missing and then stops with the message that it can't find Hal.dll in windows root/system32/. The file is there.

I also see that the hidden partition is now not hidden but has been assigned a drive letter (D) and now I can't get the Dell boot menu to reimage the hard drive to it's factory state (the required key, F8, only brings up the Windows Advanced Options menu).

I'll try next restoring both partitions as part of the same restore, but if some one knows that is doomed to failure or has other suggestions I would appreciating them.

0 Users found this helpful

The infamous BOOT.INI & HAL.DLL errors.

The HAL message is usually because of amn incorrect BOOT.INI file. The BOOT.INI file got changed somehow when W7 restarted.

Making a partition copy to an external drive will cause that problem, since the external drive is not regarded as bootable by XP / vista / 7, etc.

Why did you have to restore?

Are you hosed? Perhaps not, but possibly, but you are going to need to get a quick education on boot.ini, XP partiton manipulation, etc.

This set of articles may help:

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/bootini.shtml

You may need to get a USB FDD and a Win98 SE startup disk as well. Don't already have these - well, go find them, they are required items in my book.