brenti
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Restore windows new hard drive and the system does not boot
I've done a backup of a user's system using acronis, I then restored the system to a new hard drive and now when the system goes to startup it restarts the whole machine. The only thing changed is the hard drive. A little background - the user was on a raid, it was the windows install on the raid that I did a backup of, and I'm restoring to a brand new WD velociraptor 10,000 600gb hard drive. The backup went smoothly, the restore went smoothly, but now with only the WD drive in the system the system simply restarts itself when I try to load windows. I did an alternative method to try to recover it and I'm getting the same result - I renamed all the essential windows folders (users, windows, programdata, program files, program files x86) and then installed windows fresh, renamed the new folders to something else and renamed the old folders to their original names - this should have taken care of any initial boot issues or ECD issues. The drive is readable if I plug it into a new computer to read the contents of the drive. When i boot windows i do get the windows logo on the screen and it looks like its loading like normal but then the system just turns off. Reinstalling windows and all apps is not an option for this system. I can use acrons' feature to restore to dissimilar hardware with the original backup file I have, I just don't know what drives would be different aside from the HDD, but windows should be able to pick this up.
Another option would be to disable the raid, but I'm not very familiar with raid setups, so I'm afraid to mess with it too much as I don't want to lose any data. I'm fairly certain that if I disable the raid controller I cannot boot to either of the original drives the system has been using as the data would be unusable. Is this right? What is the best method I should take to get this guy off of the raid, onto the WD velociraptor drive and up and running WITHOUT doing a fresh install and having to reinstall all his programs? Like I said, reinstallation of everything is not an option.
Thank you!
Another option would be to disable the raid, but I'm not very familiar with raid setups, so I'm afraid to mess with it too much as I don't want to lose any data. I'm fairly certain that if I disable the raid controller I cannot boot to either of the original drives the system has been using as the data would be unusable. Is this right? What is the best method I should take to get this guy off of the raid, onto the WD velociraptor drive and up and running WITHOUT doing a fresh install and having to reinstall all his programs? Like I said, reinstallation of everything is not an option.
Thank you!
centerv
Have you booted with the win7 dvd, choose repair option and Startup repair?
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Also - did you remove ( break the RAID ) before backing up ?
if you have everything backed up ( twice preferably ), then you should be OK, especially with RAID 1 which is mirroring.
You may need to change the boot.ini to point to a different drive/ controller to boot.
I hope this helps !
if you have everything backed up ( twice preferably ), then you should be OK, especially with RAID 1 which is mirroring.
You may need to change the boot.ini to point to a different drive/ controller to boot.
I hope this helps !
ASKER
Yes, tried using the windows 7 DVD to repair startup, did not work, one of the error messages was "bad driver" in the codes it listed - didn't take down all the details.
I haven't broken the raid, want to be sure I still have something to start from, so the backup was done while in RAID mode, but then restored to a SATA disc - maybe the issue is that the original windows install on the new HDD is having problems from the HDD being in AHCI mode - I'll undhcek that. I already disabled raid in the BIOS so it isn't trying to boot from it, the raid drives are also unpluged. I did test putting them back and turning on raid mode for sata in the BIOS so I know I can get back into the original system, and I can.
I was getting 0x000000e black screen of death upon booting and having windows try to repair the windows 7 startup (the automatic repair that launches when having problems starting)
Another thought I had was to do a windows backup with the windows based utility and restoring to the new HDD through the windows 7 boot disc, i don't know if that would make a difference in booting it up.
I haven't broken the raid, want to be sure I still have something to start from, so the backup was done while in RAID mode, but then restored to a SATA disc - maybe the issue is that the original windows install on the new HDD is having problems from the HDD being in AHCI mode - I'll undhcek that. I already disabled raid in the BIOS so it isn't trying to boot from it, the raid drives are also unpluged. I did test putting them back and turning on raid mode for sata in the BIOS so I know I can get back into the original system, and I can.
I was getting 0x000000e black screen of death upon booting and having windows try to repair the windows 7 startup (the automatic repair that launches when having problems starting)
Another thought I had was to do a windows backup with the windows based utility and restoring to the new HDD through the windows 7 boot disc, i don't know if that would make a difference in booting it up.
ASKER
Thank you Noxcho - that worked! Haven't installed the sata portion yet, but I'm sure it will - the main thing is that I can boot into Windows now - THANK YOU!!!!
ASKER
The suggestion from noxcho enabled me to get into windows - thank you!
Did you change the HDD mode in BIOS to IDE compatible? Did it work this way?
Windows backup and restore will not help here also. You are taking backup from RAID and restoring it to single drive. And system still thinks it is booting from RAID. That is the problem.
Change the settings from AHCI to IDE/SATA or use Adjust OS.
Windows backup and restore will not help here also. You are taking backup from RAID and restoring it to single drive. And system still thinks it is booting from RAID. That is the problem.
Change the settings from AHCI to IDE/SATA or use Adjust OS.
he he, I was just writing my answer when you posted yours =)
Thanks for feedback and points.
Nox
Thanks for feedback and points.
Nox
ASKER
Thank you again! Haven't had to mess with AHCI and all that in a while, forogt about those settings - haven't used them since install XP on a vista machine and turning off AHCI so it'd work with XP! I'll mess with it from here, but now I know it works - thanks again for rattling my brain!
ASKER
one last comment, if you can get the system to boot into windows, you can then enable AHCI in the bios after following this KB from MS to enable the AHCI driver which will let windows boot using AHCI, otherwise it is disabled and causes the system to turn off - typically you'll see a BSOD, but its technically a hardware error so you won't be able to see or read the BSOD ... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
I tried it and it works on the system I was working with.
I tried it and it works on the system I was working with.
Thanks for update. I think this is valuable info for EE knowledge base.