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cloned drive, lost dual-bootability

J

jonno

Senior member
I have a WD640GB black drive w/4 partitions. XP Pro on C, Win7 Pro on G and two are data(E,F). I bought another identical drive and copied the old to the new w/ Data Lifeguard. XP Pro is my default OS. The copy looks right but boots directly into XP Pro. No more choice. boot.ini looks right as does bootsqm.dat. I tried booting from W7 install disc and running boot repair to no avail. Any suggestions?
 
Break out EasyBCD and have it write the Vista/7 bootloader to the MBR. Once you're up in Windiws 7, you can then use it to flesh out any further settings you need (XP can't boot Win7, so Win7 needs to be the base).
 
Thanks. OK, before I got ur message I had the bright idea of running Easy BCD but mistakenly wrote the XP bootloader to the MBR. That restored my option to dual boot like before but now it won't boot nada. If I try XP it says error w/ NTLDR, if I try W7 it goes to either BSOD or startup repair, goes thru the whole thing and says it can't fix. Oy. I just looked at both drives (8partitions) in UBUNTU. Tried to copy the good boot stuff to the bad but it wouldn't let me write any of those files. Curiously when I unloaded Ununtu and both drives were connected, the new bad drive in question booted succesfully into XP. I was agog. But as soon as I disconnected the old good drive (what I'm now on) it won't boot either again. It's a pisser. I wish there was a way to view the boot files in windows but they are way hidden it seems. I posted over at Easy BCD just in case they can help.
 
I assume you know you will have to change boot order in bios to boot from old good or the clone
Anyways thats the big drawback of easybcd - no bootable vers, and it wont work towards the offline drive
You could run bootsect.exe /nt60_all_/force (three spaces) from the dvd cmd prompt after you command lined down to the .exe with ONLY no boot drive loaded. then try its boot.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749177%28WS.10%29.aspx

20u7kud.jpg

Or you could do a rebuild BCD similarly

However the easieast thing is to just run the "clean command" from DVD cmd line diskpart to the cloned HDD.Then slave drive in PC to old good drive, clone again with casper V 6.0 free 30 day trial

So after drive is in by itself and DVD in cmd prompt then type (enter after ea)

[MAKE DOUBLE SURE YOU HAVE CORRECT (no boot) DRIVE connected by trying to boot it. I cant advise this strongly enough]

Diskpart
lis dis
sel dis 0
clean
(disk 0 should be ONLY drive listed)

NOTE WELL!!!
I also use identical drives for cloning and you must be extremely careful not to use clean command on wrong drive, thus I say to clean drive FIRST whilst only drive in system from DVD. Then reinstall drive to system and make sur old drive first in boot order. Then casper clone.
 
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I ran bootsect.exe /nt60_all_/force and that brought back my XP bootability. Then tried to clone again using Casper, but it wouldn't go thru with the copy claiming some kind of Volume Shadow Copy Error. I cloned instead using Partition Wizard. Once again XP Pro (the default) wouldn't boot. I was able to repair W7 using the installation disc this time. So in W7 I messed with some letter assignments in EasyBCD and now I'm back in business. Thanks for all the input.
 
FWIW thats one of the great things about casper
it wont clone bad situations, and it can really sniff them out
One time it gave me I/O errors - turned out to be bad sectors
 
Apparently you did not clone the drive - you copied it. Not the same thing. Cloning is a special bit by bit dup;licate that puts all boot sector and MBR files in the correct place. A cloned drive is immediately bootable exactly as was the source.
 
10-8-2010
The downloadable Data Lifeguard Tools now comes in both DOS and Windows versions and was written specifically for the installation of Western Digital EIDE hard drives. If your computer system already has a hard drive installed with an operating system of Windows 98SE or greater, you should use the Windows version of Data Lifeguard for best results. The DOS version is required if installing a hard drive in a new system without existing operating system support. If you plan on copying the contents of a boot drive, Western Digital recommends using the DOS version of Data Lifeguard Tools.
Click to expand...
I think the LAST tool I would use to clone a dual boot Win 7 and XP would be Data Lifeguard

:biggrin::biggrin::biggrin::biggrin:
 
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