Acronis clone failed and broke my pc!

[Berin]

I have a system with a dual hard drive and all data stored externally on a NAS. I run my OS and programmes on my C drive, and with the intention of backing up my OS and programmes only I used the Clone function in Acronis 11 to "back-up" my C drive to the other drive in the PC.

Acronis said it had cloned successfully and re-booted the system- but on boot up it gets as far as saying "NTDLR" is missing and stops.

Any ideas?

 

[cookie]

IIRC NTDLR is the first file the BIOS needs to boot into XP.

that message is a sign of no OS on the drive, or corruption of same. sometimes shagged drive.

you say clone. not just a normal disc image/backup?

bit hazy as i've not cloned a drive for ages, but don't you have to manually make it an active partition when you reinstall?

 

[Berin]

IIRC NTDLR is the first file the BIOS needs to boot into XP.

that message is a sign of no OS on the drive, or corruption of same. sometimes shagged drive.

you say clone. not just a normal disc image/backup?

bit hazy as i've not cloned a drive for ages, but don't you have to manually make it an active partition when you reinstall?

I just followed the prompts from Acronis. It's supposed to be what you do when you want to move to a new drive, I think - move everything, boot from the new drive and then re-format your old drive. I have the XP discs - but I've been through this before where I've ended up with multiple OS's on the drive which took ages to unravel.

 

[cookie]

you don't have a floppy in the drive do you? or altered the boot sequence in the BIOS?

when i'm next near a windows machine with acronis i'll have a look and see if i can come up with anything.

meanwhile, i did a bit of research

"In cases like this the best thing to do is to boot the original WinXP Boot CD.

Skip the first screen that offer console repair and continue as though you do a new install.

At the new installl screen it would detect the old installation and would give you an option to press R for Repair.

After about 45 Minute WinXP would be reinstalled maintaining the old data and system configuration"

 

[Berin]

Cookie, there's no disc in other drives and I didn't initially alter the boot drive sequence - I did try this in case the alleged "cloned" disc worked but that didn't work either, so i changed it back.
I've bunged the XP disc in now - let's see what it does

 

[trebor]

I had th NTLDR file is missing message on a PC at work the other week.

Basically what I did was create a windows XP boot disk on another PC and copied the NTLDR file and Boot.ini to the same disk.

Used this disk to boot the faulty PC. As XP started loaded press and hold the F8 key to get it to load in safe mode. Check that NTLDR doesn't exist on the root directory of your C: drive (it will be hidden so you have to make sure hidden files can be seen), if it doesn't, copy it from the bootable disk created earlier. Also check if Boot.ini is on the C: drive, if it is open it using Notepad and check it's not corrupt. Again if it isn't there, or it's corrupted copy it over from the boot disk.

This page on Microsofts support page gives more info on this, it also tells you how to extract these files from the XP install CD and shows what the Boot.ini file should look like.

(all the above is given in good faith and I take no responsibility if, after a few beers, I got it wrong and make it worse )

Bob

 

[Berin]

Thanks for the help everyone. I put in a disc that I thought was an XP disc. Sadly I picked up the wrong one and was in fact a recovery disc, which blitzed everything.

So 've taken the opportunity over the last couple of days to rebuild the system from the chipset drivers up

Nearly there, apart from my Photoshop won't re-install (just hangs half way through) and some iffyness around the Microsoft updates - and I'm sure I'll have issues with mapsource

And it still leaves me without my back-up OS and programmes.

Does anyone have a good strategy for this? As mentioned above, all my data is on the NAS, OS/programmes now all installed on C and I have a 2nd drive installed.

PLease don't say Acronis

 

[cookie]

PLease don't say Acronis

i did have a corrupted acronis backup once, but it's got me out of the shit many times. never heard of anything better.

i've used the old DOS Ghost which is very reliable, but fiddly. i've also used Disc Image 7 which complete rubbish.
i think the new version of the former is based on the latter.


oh, and Time Machine works well, but you'd need a Mac

 

[trebor]

I use Acronis to create backups by creating a disk image, I've had no problems whatsoever and, like cookie, it has got me out of the shit a few times.

Mind you, I run an old version, 8, which came as a freebie on the PC Plus magazine disk. Because I have had such good service from it, I was going to upgrade to the latest version last year, but then heard of 'issues' with the newer one, very similar to what you have experienced, so decided to stick with what I had.

Bob

 

[Redboots]

Does anyone have a good strategy for this? As mentioned above, all my data is on the NAS, OS/programmes now all installed on C and I have a 2nd drive installed.
PLease don't say Acronis

Plebs version of Norton Ghost, Norton Save and Restore 2 works well... and don't EVER install ANY programmes on the C drive outside of the stuff that the Windows install puts there. Partition the drive at the very least, then you can just reload the last copy you have of the OS.
Backup the OS partition to another physical, not logical drive if you have one.
Sorted.

John