NTLDR is missing

Paul wrote:
Andrew Wilson wrote:


System snapshot as requested
http://500px.com/andrew114?utm_mediu...m_source=500px

C Drive is the Win 7 installation that I'm currently using.
D Drive is the cloned C Drive that doesn't boot up.
E Drive is the Win XP drive
Thanks for your advice Paul but could you please explain simply how I
call up D Drive and fix the boot.
Thanks
Andrew

80GB | Hitachi C:
Disk 0 | Healthy (Boot, PageFile, Active, CrashDump, Primary Partition)

160GB | Hitachi D:
Disk 1 | Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

500GB | System E:
Disk 2 | Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition


OK, for a first experiment, I damaged a Win7 install on purpose.

I had a successfully booting, single partition Win7 install. That
was my starting material. I tested in a virtual machine, for easy
manipulation with more than one repair/damage CD/DVD.

I deleted C:\Boot folder and C:\bootmgr file. I then used
this command, to damage things like yours is damaged. This
puts a WinXP MBR we don't want, on my test hard drive.

bootmgr /nt52 C: /MBR

The command didn't seem to limit itself to the MBR. It
may have overwritten the C: PBR as well. At least, there
were two lines of output suggesting it did two things.

Now, to fix it:

1) Connect only the Windows 7 disk drive.
Have your Win7 installer DVD or the recovery console bootable CD handy.
These media have repair options for you.

2) Attempt to boot damaged Windows 7 disk. It reports
"NTLDR is missing", because the nt52 (WinXP) boot code is
present, and it is looking for the NTLDR of WinXP.

3) OK, insert one of the above mentioned optical disks.
Press control-alt-delete and if your boot order has CD in
front of hard drive, the CD will present a boot prompt on
the screen. Press any key (within five seconds or so), to
boot from the optical disk.

4) Accept some language and keyboard setting, press next. Now,
you want to select the "Repair Your Computer". It'll say
"System Recovery Options" and scan for the Windows 7 folder.
With only one disk drive connected, it should find Windows 7 easily.
Click Next when you're satisfied it is pointed at the one and
only C: drive. It may mention that it already sees there are
problems, and prompt for repair. You can do the repair right now
if you want (if it sees the damaged and prompts right away).

If you get to the next menu, with the five items in it, you
can select Startup Repair. This operation puts back your
bootmgr file and your boot folder. As far as I can tell, the
BCD is recomputed, to have just one menu item which points to C:.

You can reboot at this point if you want, or you can skip (5).

5) If you reboot at this point, you'll get "NTLDR is missing" if
you don't press any key at the boot prompt for the CD. In other words,
"hands off keyboard, see what happens". It should die on "NTLDR is missing:,
because the MBR still isn't fixed. Apparently the Repair Your
Computer isn't clever enough to fix the boot sector.

6) If you boot the CD and get back to the window with the five items,
you can select the bottom one. When it comes time to select the
C: partition, in the screen before the five items, it will no
longer be complaining that C: is damaged (because your bootmgr and
boot\ folder are fixed). When you get to the five item screen,
select "Command Prompt". In there, try

bootsect /NT60 C:

I didn't bother with doing it this way ( bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR ),
choosing instead to do a test reboot and see if this was enough
to fix it.

7) On the next reboot, "hands off keyboard, see what happens".
Don't boot from the CD/DVD, let the hard drive try to boot
again. Now you should have Windows 7 on your screen, nicely booted.

If you made a backup of that single drive that was plugged in, and
any of this procedure goes wrong, you'd only need to restore
that one disk drive from your complete disk backup. And you'd
be back in your original mess.

Once the 80GB drive is repaired, you can clone it if you want to
the 160GB drive. From now on, BIOS disk drive selection should be
enough to select either Win7 or WinXP, by just selecting the
drive from the BIOS menu (and not any windows menu).

I'm going to mess around some more, but for now this might
be a start at a solution. I was simulating what I think was
missing from your system, but my simulation might not have
been good enough...

Good luck,
Paul

Paul wrote:

(See notes at the bottom...)

Paul wrote:
Andrew Wilson wrote:


System snapshot as requested
http://500px.com/andrew114?utm_mediu...m_source=500px

C Drive is the Win 7 installation that I'm currently using.
D Drive is the cloned C Drive that doesn't boot up.
E Drive is the Win XP drive
Thanks for your advice Paul but could you please explain simply how I
call up D Drive and fix the boot.
Thanks
Andrew

80GB | Hitachi C:
Disk 0 | Healthy (Boot, PageFile, Active, CrashDump, Primary Partition)

160GB | Hitachi D:
Disk 1 | Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

500GB | System E:
Disk 2 | Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition


OK, for a first experiment, I damaged a Win7 install on purpose.

I had a successfully booting, single partition Win7 install. That
was my starting material. I tested in a virtual machine, for easy
manipulation with more than one repair/damage CD/DVD.

I deleted C:\Boot folder and C:\bootmgr file. I then used
this command, to damage things like yours is damaged. This
puts a WinXP MBR we don't want, on my test hard drive.

bootmgr /nt52 C: /MBR

The command didn't seem to limit itself to the MBR. It
may have overwritten the C: PBR as well. At least, there
were two lines of output suggesting it did two things.

Now, to fix it:

1) Connect only the Windows 7 disk drive.
Have your Win7 installer DVD or the recovery console bootable CD handy.
These media have repair options for you.

2) Attempt to boot damaged Windows 7 disk. It reports
"NTLDR is missing", because the nt52 (WinXP) boot code is
present, and it is looking for the NTLDR of WinXP.

3) OK, insert one of the above mentioned optical disks.
Press control-alt-delete and if your boot order has CD in
front of hard drive, the CD will present a boot prompt on
the screen. Press any key (within five seconds or so), to
boot from the optical disk.

4) Accept some language and keyboard setting, press next. Now,
you want to select the "Repair Your Computer". It'll say
"System Recovery Options" and scan for the Windows 7 folder.
With only one disk drive connected, it should find Windows 7 easily.
Click Next when you're satisfied it is pointed at the one and
only C: drive. It may mention that it already sees there are
problems, and prompt for repair. You can do the repair right now
if you want (if it sees the damaged and prompts right away).

If you get to the next menu, with the five items in it, you
can select Startup Repair. This operation puts back your
bootmgr file and your boot folder. As far as I can tell, the
BCD is recomputed, to have just one menu item which points to C:.

You can reboot at this point if you want, or you can skip (5).

5) If you reboot at this point, you'll get "NTLDR is missing" if
you don't press any key at the boot prompt for the CD. In other words,
"hands off keyboard, see what happens". It should die on "NTLDR is
missing:,
because the MBR still isn't fixed. Apparently the Repair Your
Computer isn't clever enough to fix the boot sector.

6) If you boot the CD and get back to the window with the five items,
you can select the bottom one. When it comes time to select the
C: partition, in the screen before the five items, it will no
longer be complaining that C: is damaged (because your bootmgr and
boot\ folder are fixed). When you get to the five item screen,
select "Command Prompt". In there, try

bootsect /NT60 C:

I didn't bother with doing it this way ( bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR ),
choosing instead to do a test reboot and see if this was enough
to fix it.

7) On the next reboot, "hands off keyboard, see what happens".
Don't boot from the CD/DVD, let the hard drive try to boot
again. Now you should have Windows 7 on your screen, nicely booted.

If you made a backup of that single drive that was plugged in, and
any of this procedure goes wrong, you'd only need to restore
that one disk drive from your complete disk backup. And you'd
be back in your original mess.

Once the 80GB drive is repaired, you can clone it if you want to
the 160GB drive. From now on, BIOS disk drive selection should be
enough to select either Win7 or WinXP, by just selecting the
drive from the BIOS menu (and not any windows menu).

I'm going to mess around some more, but for now this might
be a start at a solution. I was simulating what I think was
missing from your system, but my simulation might not have
been good enough...

Good luck,
Paul

I did a few more experiments, namely doing actual installs of
WinXP followed by Win7. And these are my notes.

1) When the Win7 installer DVD or a recovery console CD is
inserted into the machine, the "Press any key" response
of the optical media at boot time, only happens if the optical
media can see evidence of an OS present. It uses the "active"
or "boot" flag for this. All your disks happen to have a boot
flag right now, so not a problem. My attempt to install Win7
after WinXP, Win7 disk had no boot flag (not a surprise really).

Solution: Don't worry if you boot the installer DVD, and the
scanner cannot find an OS. The single disk and OS partition
will likely show as C:. To fix the "Boot Flag" issue,
you can use "diskpart", "list disk", "select disk 0".
"list partition", "select partition 1", then "Active"
to make Partition 1 have a boot flag. That's if you
know for sure, that's where the boot stuff is. If Win7
has SYSTEM RESERVED, SYSTEM RESERVED is supposed to have
the boot flag. Yours doesn't have that, and your install
is a single partition, and the Win7 C: is the one that gets
the boot flag in your case.

2) Active flag also causes scan for Windows 7 partition while
in recovery console CD.

When you boot the installer DVD, then select Repair, the scanner
looks for a C: partition to play with. It will not look, if the
partition doesn't have the Active (Boot flag) set.

3) Once the active flag is set on the Windows partition, the
scanner will then consider the health of the partition.
It may even prompt immediately, and tell you that a Repair
is needed. Yet, if conditions aren't right, the Repair finished
in the blink of an eye, and in fact it didn't Repair anything.

To help the poor thing, we can work on MBR boot code and PBR boot code.
The MBR boot code is in sector 0 of the target hard drive. The
Partition Boor Record (PBR) is in the header of the NTFS file system
on C:. It is consulted some time after the MBR is consulted.

In the Recovery console (Command Prompt) window offered by the
installer DVD (or recovery console CD), you can do these.

bootsect /NT60 C:

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.

That one only updates the PBR. The single message hints at that.
This command, however, fixes both necessary items.

bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode. --- PBR

Successfully updated disk bootcode --- MBR

4) OK, not that Active is set on the partition that does the
booting (SYSTEM RESERVED on two partition install, C: on a
single partition install), it's time to boot the installer DVD
once again. The scanner will look for the OS, as before. If
it offers immediately to repair C: (put back bootmgr and boot folder),
then this time, it should work. It will take a couple of seconds to
complete.

If it doesn't prompt, go to the next screen with the five items
and select the Startup Repair from there.

5) After step 4, if you take your hands off the keyboard and let it
test boot, you'll see Windows 7 in all its glory.

Note that, certain file system corruptions cannot be fixed. If
you fool around with certain files in System Volume Information,
your OS is not coming back. The above repair info is
just for your specific case. It implies, with enough
manual coaxing (boot flag, MBR, PBR), you can "make
a sacrificial offering to the Startup Repair Gods".
And Windows 7 should then boot as a single disk by
itself. It is then fit to clone with Acronis, to a
new disk.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message ...

Paul wrote:

(See notes at the bottom...)

Paul wrote:
Andrew Wilson wrote:


System snapshot as requested
http://500px.com/andrew114?utm_mediu...m_source=500px
C Drive is the Win 7 installation that I'm currently using.
D Drive is the cloned C Drive that doesn't boot up.
E Drive is the Win XP drive
Thanks for your advice Paul but could you please explain simply how I
call up D Drive and fix the boot.
Thanks
Andrew

80GB | Hitachi C:
Disk 0 | Healthy (Boot, PageFile, Active, CrashDump, Primary Partition)

160GB | Hitachi D:
Disk 1 | Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

500GB | System E:
Disk 2 | Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition


OK, for a first experiment, I damaged a Win7 install on purpose.

I had a successfully booting, single partition Win7 install. That
was my starting material. I tested in a virtual machine, for easy
manipulation with more than one repair/damage CD/DVD.

I deleted C:\Boot folder and C:\bootmgr file. I then used
this command, to damage things like yours is damaged. This
puts a WinXP MBR we don't want, on my test hard drive.

bootmgr /nt52 C: /MBR

The command didn't seem to limit itself to the MBR. It
may have overwritten the C: PBR as well. At least, there
were two lines of output suggesting it did two things.

Now, to fix it:

1) Connect only the Windows 7 disk drive.
Have your Win7 installer DVD or the recovery console bootable CD handy.
These media have repair options for you.

2) Attempt to boot damaged Windows 7 disk. It reports
"NTLDR is missing", because the nt52 (WinXP) boot code is
present, and it is looking for the NTLDR of WinXP.

3) OK, insert one of the above mentioned optical disks.
Press control-alt-delete and if your boot order has CD in
front of hard drive, the CD will present a boot prompt on
the screen. Press any key (within five seconds or so), to
boot from the optical disk.

4) Accept some language and keyboard setting, press next. Now,
you want to select the "Repair Your Computer". It'll say
"System Recovery Options" and scan for the Windows 7 folder.
With only one disk drive connected, it should find Windows 7 easily.
Click Next when you're satisfied it is pointed at the one and
only C: drive. It may mention that it already sees there are
problems, and prompt for repair. You can do the repair right now
if you want (if it sees the damaged and prompts right away).

If you get to the next menu, with the five items in it, you
can select Startup Repair. This operation puts back your
bootmgr file and your boot folder. As far as I can tell, the
BCD is recomputed, to have just one menu item which points to C:.

You can reboot at this point if you want, or you can skip (5).

5) If you reboot at this point, you'll get "NTLDR is missing" if
you don't press any key at the boot prompt for the CD. In other words,
"hands off keyboard, see what happens". It should die on "NTLDR is
missing:,
because the MBR still isn't fixed. Apparently the Repair Your
Computer isn't clever enough to fix the boot sector.

6) If you boot the CD and get back to the window with the five items,
you can select the bottom one. When it comes time to select the
C: partition, in the screen before the five items, it will no
longer be complaining that C: is damaged (because your bootmgr and
boot\ folder are fixed). When you get to the five item screen,
select "Command Prompt". In there, try

bootsect /NT60 C:

I didn't bother with doing it this way ( bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR ),
choosing instead to do a test reboot and see if this was enough
to fix it.

7) On the next reboot, "hands off keyboard, see what happens".
Don't boot from the CD/DVD, let the hard drive try to boot
again. Now you should have Windows 7 on your screen, nicely booted.

If you made a backup of that single drive that was plugged in, and
any of this procedure goes wrong, you'd only need to restore
that one disk drive from your complete disk backup. And you'd
be back in your original mess.

Once the 80GB drive is repaired, you can clone it if you want to
the 160GB drive. From now on, BIOS disk drive selection should be
enough to select either Win7 or WinXP, by just selecting the
drive from the BIOS menu (and not any windows menu).

I'm going to mess around some more, but for now this might
be a start at a solution. I was simulating what I think was
missing from your system, but my simulation might not have
been good enough...

Good luck,
Paul

I did a few more experiments, namely doing actual installs of
WinXP followed by Win7. And these are my notes.

1) When the Win7 installer DVD or a recovery console CD is
inserted into the machine, the "Press any key" response
of the optical media at boot time, only happens if the optical
media can see evidence of an OS present. It uses the "active"
or "boot" flag for this. All your disks happen to have a boot
flag right now, so not a problem. My attempt to install Win7
after WinXP, Win7 disk had no boot flag (not a surprise really).

Solution: Don't worry if you boot the installer DVD, and the
scanner cannot find an OS. The single disk and OS partition
will likely show as C:. To fix the "Boot Flag" issue,
you can use "diskpart", "list disk", "select disk 0".
"list partition", "select partition 1", then "Active"
to make Partition 1 have a boot flag. That's if you
know for sure, that's where the boot stuff is. If Win7
has SYSTEM RESERVED, SYSTEM RESERVED is supposed to have
the boot flag. Yours doesn't have that, and your install
is a single partition, and the Win7 C: is the one that gets
the boot flag in your case.

2) Active flag also causes scan for Windows 7 partition while
in recovery console CD.

When you boot the installer DVD, then select Repair, the scanner
looks for a C: partition to play with. It will not look, if the
partition doesn't have the Active (Boot flag) set.

3) Once the active flag is set on the Windows partition, the
scanner will then consider the health of the partition.
It may even prompt immediately, and tell you that a Repair
is needed. Yet, if conditions aren't right, the Repair finished
in the blink of an eye, and in fact it didn't Repair anything.

To help the poor thing, we can work on MBR boot code and PBR boot code.
The MBR boot code is in sector 0 of the target hard drive. The
Partition Boor Record (PBR) is in the header of the NTFS file system
on C:. It is consulted some time after the MBR is consulted.

In the Recovery console (Command Prompt) window offered by the
installer DVD (or recovery console CD), you can do these.

bootsect /NT60 C:

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.

That one only updates the PBR. The single message hints at that.
This command, however, fixes both necessary items.

bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode. --- PBR

Successfully updated disk bootcode --- MBR

4) OK, not that Active is set on the partition that does the
booting (SYSTEM RESERVED on two partition install, C: on a
single partition install), it's time to boot the installer DVD
once again. The scanner will look for the OS, as before. If
it offers immediately to repair C: (put back bootmgr and boot folder),
then this time, it should work. It will take a couple of seconds to
complete.

If it doesn't prompt, go to the next screen with the five items
and select the Startup Repair from there.

5) After step 4, if you take your hands off the keyboard and let it
test boot, you'll see Windows 7 in all its glory.

Note that, certain file system corruptions cannot be fixed. If
you fool around with certain files in System Volume Information,
your OS is not coming back. The above repair info is
just for your specific case. It implies, with enough
manual coaxing (boot flag, MBR, PBR), you can "make
a sacrificial offering to the Startup Repair Gods".
And Windows 7 should then boot as a single disk by
itself. It is then fit to clone with Acronis, to a
new disk.

Paul

Paul
Many thanks for doing this it is much appreciated and thank you for your
time.
Having read all three of your posts and not really understanding what I
should do I next I thought I should point out the following that I think you
may have missed.
On boot I am offered WinXP or Win7. If I choose WinXP the machine boots from
Disk 2 with no apparent problems and is perfectly usable. If I choose Win7
the machine boots from Disk 0 again with no apparent problems although I
only have 2GB of space left hence my failed Acronis clone to Disk 1.
If I do a Win7 clone onto Disk 2 and remove all traces of Win XP from the
system would this be a possible solution? If not please advise further.
Many thanks
Andrew


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Andrew Wilson wrote:

Paul
Many thanks for doing this it is much appreciated and thank you for your
time.
Having read all three of your posts and not really understanding what I
should do I next I thought I should point out the following that I think
you may have missed.
On boot I am offered WinXP or Win7. If I choose WinXP the machine boots
from Disk 2 with no apparent problems and is perfectly usable. If I
choose Win7 the machine boots from Disk 0 again with no apparent
problems although I only have 2GB of space left hence my failed Acronis
clone to Disk 1.
If I do a Win7 clone onto Disk 2 and remove all traces of Win XP from
the system would this be a possible solution? If not please advise further.
Many thanks
Andrew

I'll paraphrase my last three posts:

1) Your setup is more than a little broken.

2) To fix it, you need to repair the original Windows 7 to the point
that the 80GB disk drive works all by itself (no other disks are
allowed to be connected). Once the original Windows 7 disk is
repaired, you would then attempt the cloning step again (80GB -- 160GB).

3) The easiest way to fix the boot-ability of the Windows 7 drive,
in a way that makes it self-sufficient, is to connect only the
Windows 7 drive (which will cause it to break, instantly). Then
use the Windows 7 installer DVD, using either the Startup Repair tool
or the Command Prompt window, as the steps require. Your MBR is wrong,
your boot files are on the wrong drive. The bootsect command fixes
the MBR and PBR for you. The Startup Repair fixes the missing bootmgr and
C:\boot folder issue. After that, the Windows 7 disk, plugged in all by
itself, will boot without the help of the WinXP drive.

As it stands now, Disk 0 and Disk 2 are "intertwined". You cannot clone
Disk 0 successfully, because some necessary bits are on Disk 2. Making
the necessary bits move back to Disk 0, is going to fix this for you.
Then clone Disk 0 to Disk 1. Disk 2 is in fine shape by itself, and
should boot WinXP for you no matter what. But Disk 0 needs help right now.
And plugging in Disk 0 by itself, and doing Startup Repair, is going to fix
it up for you. It's too bad the Startup Repair doesn't correct the MBR
and PBR, but the bootsect command can do that as a separate step.

HTH,
Paul

"Andrew Wilson" wrote in message ...



"Paul" wrote in message ...

Paul wrote:

(See notes at the bottom...)

Paul wrote:
Andrew Wilson wrote:


System snapshot as requested
http://500px.com/andrew114?utm_mediu...m_source=500px
C Drive is the Win 7 installation that I'm currently using.
D Drive is the cloned C Drive that doesn't boot up.
E Drive is the Win XP drive
Thanks for your advice Paul but could you please explain simply how I
call up D Drive and fix the boot.
Thanks
Andrew

80GB | Hitachi C:
Disk 0 | Healthy (Boot, PageFile, Active, CrashDump, Primary Partition)

160GB | Hitachi D:
Disk 1 | Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)

500GB | System E:
Disk 2 | Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition


OK, for a first experiment, I damaged a Win7 install on purpose.

I had a successfully booting, single partition Win7 install. That
was my starting material. I tested in a virtual machine, for easy
manipulation with more than one repair/damage CD/DVD.

I deleted C:\Boot folder and C:\bootmgr file. I then used
this command, to damage things like yours is damaged. This
puts a WinXP MBR we don't want, on my test hard drive.

bootmgr /nt52 C: /MBR

The command didn't seem to limit itself to the MBR. It
may have overwritten the C: PBR as well. At least, there
were two lines of output suggesting it did two things.

Now, to fix it:

1) Connect only the Windows 7 disk drive.
Have your Win7 installer DVD or the recovery console bootable CD handy.
These media have repair options for you.

2) Attempt to boot damaged Windows 7 disk. It reports
"NTLDR is missing", because the nt52 (WinXP) boot code is
present, and it is looking for the NTLDR of WinXP.

3) OK, insert one of the above mentioned optical disks.
Press control-alt-delete and if your boot order has CD in
front of hard drive, the CD will present a boot prompt on
the screen. Press any key (within five seconds or so), to
boot from the optical disk.

4) Accept some language and keyboard setting, press next. Now,
you want to select the "Repair Your Computer". It'll say
"System Recovery Options" and scan for the Windows 7 folder.
With only one disk drive connected, it should find Windows 7 easily.
Click Next when you're satisfied it is pointed at the one and
only C: drive. It may mention that it already sees there are
problems, and prompt for repair. You can do the repair right now
if you want (if it sees the damaged and prompts right away).

If you get to the next menu, with the five items in it, you
can select Startup Repair. This operation puts back your
bootmgr file and your boot folder. As far as I can tell, the
BCD is recomputed, to have just one menu item which points to C:.

You can reboot at this point if you want, or you can skip (5).

5) If you reboot at this point, you'll get "NTLDR is missing" if
you don't press any key at the boot prompt for the CD. In other words,
"hands off keyboard, see what happens". It should die on "NTLDR is
missing:,
because the MBR still isn't fixed. Apparently the Repair Your
Computer isn't clever enough to fix the boot sector.

6) If you boot the CD and get back to the window with the five items,
you can select the bottom one. When it comes time to select the
C: partition, in the screen before the five items, it will no
longer be complaining that C: is damaged (because your bootmgr and
boot\ folder are fixed). When you get to the five item screen,
select "Command Prompt". In there, try

bootsect /NT60 C:

I didn't bother with doing it this way ( bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR ),
choosing instead to do a test reboot and see if this was enough
to fix it.

7) On the next reboot, "hands off keyboard, see what happens".
Don't boot from the CD/DVD, let the hard drive try to boot
again. Now you should have Windows 7 on your screen, nicely booted.

If you made a backup of that single drive that was plugged in, and
any of this procedure goes wrong, you'd only need to restore
that one disk drive from your complete disk backup. And you'd
be back in your original mess.

Once the 80GB drive is repaired, you can clone it if you want to
the 160GB drive. From now on, BIOS disk drive selection should be
enough to select either Win7 or WinXP, by just selecting the
drive from the BIOS menu (and not any windows menu).

I'm going to mess around some more, but for now this might
be a start at a solution. I was simulating what I think was
missing from your system, but my simulation might not have
been good enough...

Good luck,
Paul

I did a few more experiments, namely doing actual installs of
WinXP followed by Win7. And these are my notes.

1) When the Win7 installer DVD or a recovery console CD is
inserted into the machine, the "Press any key" response
of the optical media at boot time, only happens if the optical
media can see evidence of an OS present. It uses the "active"
or "boot" flag for this. All your disks happen to have a boot
flag right now, so not a problem. My attempt to install Win7
after WinXP, Win7 disk had no boot flag (not a surprise really).

Solution: Don't worry if you boot the installer DVD, and the
scanner cannot find an OS. The single disk and OS partition
will likely show as C:. To fix the "Boot Flag" issue,
you can use "diskpart", "list disk", "select disk 0".
"list partition", "select partition 1", then "Active"
to make Partition 1 have a boot flag. That's if you
know for sure, that's where the boot stuff is. If Win7
has SYSTEM RESERVED, SYSTEM RESERVED is supposed to have
the boot flag. Yours doesn't have that, and your install
is a single partition, and the Win7 C: is the one that gets
the boot flag in your case.

2) Active flag also causes scan for Windows 7 partition while
in recovery console CD.

When you boot the installer DVD, then select Repair, the scanner
looks for a C: partition to play with. It will not look, if the
partition doesn't have the Active (Boot flag) set.

3) Once the active flag is set on the Windows partition, the
scanner will then consider the health of the partition.
It may even prompt immediately, and tell you that a Repair
is needed. Yet, if conditions aren't right, the Repair finished
in the blink of an eye, and in fact it didn't Repair anything.

To help the poor thing, we can work on MBR boot code and PBR boot code.
The MBR boot code is in sector 0 of the target hard drive. The
Partition Boor Record (PBR) is in the header of the NTFS file system
on C:. It is consulted some time after the MBR is consulted.

In the Recovery console (Command Prompt) window offered by the
installer DVD (or recovery console CD), you can do these.

bootsect /NT60 C:

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.

That one only updates the PBR. The single message hints at that.
This command, however, fixes both necessary items.

bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode. --- PBR

Successfully updated disk bootcode --- MBR

4) OK, not that Active is set on the partition that does the
booting (SYSTEM RESERVED on two partition install, C: on a
single partition install), it's time to boot the installer DVD
once again. The scanner will look for the OS, as before. If
it offers immediately to repair C: (put back bootmgr and boot folder),
then this time, it should work. It will take a couple of seconds to
complete.

If it doesn't prompt, go to the next screen with the five items
and select the Startup Repair from there.

5) After step 4, if you take your hands off the keyboard and let it
test boot, you'll see Windows 7 in all its glory.

Note that, certain file system corruptions cannot be fixed. If
you fool around with certain files in System Volume Information,
your OS is not coming back. The above repair info is
just for your specific case. It implies, with enough
manual coaxing (boot flag, MBR, PBR), you can "make
a sacrificial offering to the Startup Repair Gods".
And Windows 7 should then boot as a single disk by
itself. It is then fit to clone with Acronis, to a
new disk.

Paul

Paul
Many thanks for doing this it is much appreciated and thank you for your
time.
Having read all three of your posts and not really understanding what I
should do I next I thought I should point out the following that I think you
may have missed.
On boot I am offered WinXP or Win7. If I choose WinXP the machine boots from
Disk 2 with no apparent problems and is perfectly usable. If I choose Win7
the machine boots from Disk 0 again with no apparent problems although I
only have 2GB of space left hence my failed Acronis clone to Disk 1.
If I do a Win7 clone onto Disk 2 and remove all traces of Win XP from the
system would this be a possible solution? If not please advise further.
Many thanks
Andrew

Forgot also to say that if I choose WinXP I have to change the SATA
controller to IDE in BIOS before it will boot similarly I have to change the
SATA controller to AHCI in BIOS before I boot Win 7. Could this be causing
me problems.
Thanks
Andrew


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Andrew Wilson wrote:


Forgot also to say that if I choose WinXP I have to change the SATA
controller to IDE in BIOS before it will boot similarly I have to change
the SATA controller to AHCI in BIOS before I boot Win 7. Could this be
causing me problems.
Thanks
Andrew

You can change the Win7 one the easiest.

Using Regedit while Windows 7 is running, set the
Start item in these keys to zero. Set both of them.
Now, reboot the computer, enter the BIOS and select
IDE or AHCI. The reason you set both of them, is in
case you change your mind :-) Turning on too many
of these, is not a problem. 0 = re-arm. If never touched,
the value is likely 3 but that's not important.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\pciide\Start == 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\msahci\Start == 0

If WinXP uses IDE, then do these registry changes in Win7 Registry,
reboot, select IDE in the BIOS, Save and Exit, allow Win7 to boot
again, and it should be using IDE. Now, either OS should boot with
no problems.

Once the WinXP disk is removed from the system, you can again,
do whatever you like.

So Win7 makes a few driver cases, easy to solve. WinXP, on
the other hand, makes this particular change "difficult to
impossible". Much Catch22 in WinXP...

*******

I would do this procedure first, before the other one, so
all OSes are using the same BIOS setting.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message ...

Andrew Wilson wrote:


Forgot also to say that if I choose WinXP I have to change the SATA
controller to IDE in BIOS before it will boot similarly I have to change
the SATA controller to AHCI in BIOS before I boot Win 7. Could this be
causing me problems.
Thanks
Andrew

You can change the Win7 one the easiest.

Using Regedit while Windows 7 is running, set the
Start item in these keys to zero. Set both of them.
Now, reboot the computer, enter the BIOS and select
IDE or AHCI. The reason you set both of them, is in
case you change your mind :-) Turning on too many
of these, is not a problem. 0 = re-arm. If never touched,
the value is likely 3 but that's not important.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\pciide\Start == 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\msahci\Start == 0

If WinXP uses IDE, then do these registry changes in Win7 Registry,
reboot, select IDE in the BIOS, Save and Exit, allow Win7 to boot
again, and it should be using IDE. Now, either OS should boot with
no problems.

Once the WinXP disk is removed from the system, you can again,
do whatever you like.

So Win7 makes a few driver cases, easy to solve. WinXP, on
the other hand, makes this particular change "difficult to
impossible". Much Catch22 in WinXP...

*******

I would do this procedure first, before the other one, so
all OSes are using the same BIOS setting.

Paul

Paul
Many thanks.
Done this successfully.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\pciide\Start == 0
was set to 3 but changed it to 0.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\servic es\msahci\Start == 0
was already set to 0 so left it.
Win 7 appears to be using IDE as it installed a driver on loading and asked
me to restart.
I won't be using the Win XP 500GB drive further if I can get the Win 7
successfully cloned to a larger drive then ultimately the 500GB drive.
As there are so many posts from you could you please copy and paste what I
do next (is it disconnect the 500GB Win XP drive?).
Many thanks
Andrew




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Andrew Wilson wrote:

As there are so many posts from you could you please copy and paste what
I do next (is it disconnect the 500GB Win XP drive?).
Many thanks
Andrew

1) Connect only the Windows 7 disk drive.
Have your Win7 installer DVD or the recovery console bootable CD handy.
These media have repair options for you.

2) Attempt to boot damaged Windows 7 hard drive. It reports
"NTLDR is missing", because the nt52 (WinXP) boot code is
present, and it is looking for the NTLDR of WinXP. Of course,
there isn't any, as this is Windows 7.

3) OK, insert one of the above mentioned optical disks.
Press control-alt-delete and if your boot order has CD in
front of hard drive, the CD will present a boot prompt on
the screen. Press any key (within five seconds or so), to
boot from the optical disk.

4) Accept some language and keyboard setting, press next. Now,
you want to select the "Repair Your Computer". It'll say
"System Recovery Options" and scan for the Windows 7 folder.
With only one disk drive connected, it should find Windows 7 easily.
(It could take as long as two or three minutes, don't panic.)
For the first attempt, it's going to prompt you right away,
that it has found a problem and will attempt to Repair it.

After it attempts to repair it, it will basically have done
nothing useful. (The repair takes about a tenth of a second,
and nothing can be repaired that fast. It had a problem and
basically just stopped repairing.) With some luck, we're back
to step 4 again. This time, it'll scan for the Windows 7 folder
and find it. So the first repair attempt, it will help you
make progress on step (4) when done a second time.

On the second attempt, it should finally list your C:
Like in this picture.

http://i62.tinypic.com/nloi7q.gif

5) When you click the upper button, of the two buttons available,
to work on that C: partition, you'll see a menu with five options.

http://i58.tinypic.com/28kj2ih.gif

You want the Command Prompt one at the bottom.
You enter this at the command line.

bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR

The response will indicate the PBR and MBR are repaired, like this.

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.

Successfully updated disk bootcode

You can dismiss the Command Prompt window.

6) The next step, is to get back to the five line menu, but
select Startup Repair at the top. It'll put a copy of
bootmgr file on C:, as well as a new C:/Boot folder full of files.

7) On the next reboot, "hands off keyboard, see what happens".
Don't boot from the CD/DVD, let the hard drive try to boot
again. Now you should have Windows 7 on your screen, nicely booted.

*******

HTH,
Paul

"Paul" wrote in message ...

Andrew Wilson wrote:

As there are so many posts from you could you please copy and paste what I
do next (is it disconnect the 500GB Win XP drive?).
Many thanks
Andrew

1) Connect only the Windows 7 disk drive.
Have your Win7 installer DVD or the recovery console bootable CD handy.
These media have repair options for you.

2) Attempt to boot damaged Windows 7 hard drive. It reports
"NTLDR is missing", because the nt52 (WinXP) boot code is
present, and it is looking for the NTLDR of WinXP. Of course,
there isn't any, as this is Windows 7.

3) OK, insert one of the above mentioned optical disks.
Press control-alt-delete and if your boot order has CD in
front of hard drive, the CD will present a boot prompt on
the screen. Press any key (within five seconds or so), to
boot from the optical disk.

4) Accept some language and keyboard setting, press next. Now,
you want to select the "Repair Your Computer". It'll say
"System Recovery Options" and scan for the Windows 7 folder.
With only one disk drive connected, it should find Windows 7 easily.
(It could take as long as two or three minutes, don't panic.)
For the first attempt, it's going to prompt you right away,
that it has found a problem and will attempt to Repair it.

After it attempts to repair it, it will basically have done
nothing useful. (The repair takes about a tenth of a second,
and nothing can be repaired that fast. It had a problem and
basically just stopped repairing.) With some luck, we're back
to step 4 again. This time, it'll scan for the Windows 7 folder
and find it. So the first repair attempt, it will help you
make progress on step (4) when done a second time.

On the second attempt, it should finally list your C:
Like in this picture.

http://i62.tinypic.com/nloi7q.gif

5) When you click the upper button, of the two buttons available,
to work on that C: partition, you'll see a menu with five options.

http://i58.tinypic.com/28kj2ih.gif

You want the Command Prompt one at the bottom.
You enter this at the command line.

bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR

The response will indicate the PBR and MBR are repaired, like this.

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.

Successfully updated disk bootcode

You can dismiss the Command Prompt window.

6) The next step, is to get back to the five line menu, but
select Startup Repair at the top. It'll put a copy of
bootmgr file on C:, as well as a new C:/Boot folder full of files.

7) On the next reboot, "hands off keyboard, see what happens".
Don't boot from the CD/DVD, let the hard drive try to boot
again. Now you should have Windows 7 on your screen, nicely booted.

*******

HTH,
Paul

I am eternally grateful to you, Paul for spending so much time on this and
helping an anonymous unskilled computer user. I wouldn't have had a clue on
my own. I have to go out now so will do this tomorrow and report back.
Thanks again
Andrew


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"Andrew Wilson" wrote in message ...



"Paul" wrote in message ...

Andrew Wilson wrote:

As there are so many posts from you could you please copy and paste what I
do next (is it disconnect the 500GB Win XP drive?).
Many thanks
Andrew

1) Connect only the Windows 7 disk drive.
Have your Win7 installer DVD or the recovery console bootable CD handy.
These media have repair options for you.

2) Attempt to boot damaged Windows 7 hard drive. It reports
"NTLDR is missing", because the nt52 (WinXP) boot code is
present, and it is looking for the NTLDR of WinXP. Of course,
there isn't any, as this is Windows 7.

3) OK, insert one of the above mentioned optical disks.
Press control-alt-delete and if your boot order has CD in
front of hard drive, the CD will present a boot prompt on
the screen. Press any key (within five seconds or so), to
boot from the optical disk.

4) Accept some language and keyboard setting, press next. Now,
you want to select the "Repair Your Computer". It'll say
"System Recovery Options" and scan for the Windows 7 folder.
With only one disk drive connected, it should find Windows 7 easily.
(It could take as long as two or three minutes, don't panic.)
For the first attempt, it's going to prompt you right away,
that it has found a problem and will attempt to Repair it.

After it attempts to repair it, it will basically have done
nothing useful. (The repair takes about a tenth of a second,
and nothing can be repaired that fast. It had a problem and
basically just stopped repairing.) With some luck, we're back
to step 4 again. This time, it'll scan for the Windows 7 folder
and find it. So the first repair attempt, it will help you
make progress on step (4) when done a second time.

On the second attempt, it should finally list your C:
Like in this picture.

http://i62.tinypic.com/nloi7q.gif

5) When you click the upper button, of the two buttons available,
to work on that C: partition, you'll see a menu with five options.

http://i58.tinypic.com/28kj2ih.gif

You want the Command Prompt one at the bottom.
You enter this at the command line.

bootsect /NT60 C: /MBR

The response will indicate the PBR and MBR are repaired, like this.

Successfully updated NTFS filesystem bootcode.

Successfully updated disk bootcode

You can dismiss the Command Prompt window.

6) The next step, is to get back to the five line menu, but
select Startup Repair at the top. It'll put a copy of
bootmgr file on C:, as well as a new C:/Boot folder full of files.

7) On the next reboot, "hands off keyboard, see what happens".
Don't boot from the CD/DVD, let the hard drive try to boot
again. Now you should have Windows 7 on your screen, nicely booted.

*******

HTH,
Paul

I am eternally grateful to you, Paul for spending so much time on this and
helping an anonymous unskilled computer user. I wouldn't have had a clue on
my own. I have to go out now so will do this tomorrow and report back.
Thanks again
Andrew


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Paul
Followed your list to the letter and I am extremely pleased to say that it
worked and repaired exactly as you described. I am exceptionally grateful to
you for all the time and effort that you put into this.
What is the next step - connect all the hard drives back up including the
500GB WinXP drive? I will eventually be wiping this drive and hopefully
cloning the current Win7 80GB drive to the former WinXP 500GB drive and also
a back up to the 160GB drive. The 80GB drive can then be removed and stored.
Thanks again
Andrew


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http://www.avast.com

Andrew Wilson wrote:


Paul
Followed your list to the letter and I am extremely pleased to say that
it worked and repaired exactly as you described. I am exceptionally
grateful to you for all the time and effort that you put into this.
What is the next step - connect all the hard drives back up including
the 500GB WinXP drive? I will eventually be wiping this drive and
hopefully cloning the current Win7 80GB drive to the former WinXP 500GB
drive and also a back up to the 160GB drive. The 80GB drive can then be
removed and stored.
Thanks again
Andrew


I'm glad to hear that all went well. The Microsoft repair thing
is a good idea, but there is still room for improvements in it.

80GB Win7 (fixed)

160GB

500GB WinXP

The fixed Win7 one, you've verified that it boots by itself.

You could also verify that the WinXP one boots OK by itself.
If it doesn't work by itself, it might require "fixmbr" or
"fixboot C:", with the WinXP disk connected by itself, and
the WinXP installer CD used to access the recovery console
(command prompt).

*******

The WinXP install CD is a bit of a pain when repairing things,
because during the scan for the OS partition, selecting the
partition is easy, but then it asks for the administrator password.
You might be using a different password for your regular account,
than for the administrator account.

For example, to view the accounts, from a WinXP Command Prompt
window while the OS is running, you can type

control userpasswords2

and it sill show you a table of accounts. For example, mine has

User Name Group
Administrator Administrators
Paul Administrators

There is also a tick box in that panel, for not having to
enter a password during startup login. If you define passwords
for the accounts, a side effect might be that it'll be looking
for the password at startup time.

If you can get to "control userpasswords2" OK, then you
could even reset the Administrator password. It's when you
can't get into that control panel at all, that there's a
problem. You can see, with these details above, that
the recovery console requiring a password, can be a big
deal. Some people have never used their administrator
account before, and haven't a clue what the password is.

I hope zero work is necessary on the WinXP one, and that
it just boots. But at least I'm feeling pretty good right
now, that you've got one working OS disk. Because with
that Win7 disk, you[ll be able to post your questions here :-)

Once you're happy each OS is working well, you can clone
them as you want. To clone a larger drive to a smaller drive,
the cloning tool has to understand how to resize things. That's
something you might want to verify about Acronis. The tool I use,
the cloning thing only works if the biggest partition is at
the end of the disk. And some cloners, don't handle resizing
at all, and can't transfer a big disk to a smaller disk, without
a lot of fiddling first. Going from your 80GB to the 160GB
drive, was the easy case.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message ...

Andrew Wilson wrote:


Paul
Followed your list to the letter and I am extremely pleased to say that it
worked and repaired exactly as you described. I am exceptionally grateful
to you for all the time and effort that you put into this.
What is the next step - connect all the hard drives back up including the
500GB WinXP drive? I will eventually be wiping this drive and hopefully
cloning the current Win7 80GB drive to the former WinXP 500GB drive and
also a back up to the 160GB drive. The 80GB drive can then be removed and
stored.
Thanks again
Andrew


I'm glad to hear that all went well. The Microsoft repair thing
is a good idea, but there is still room for improvements in it.

80GB Win7 (fixed)

160GB

500GB WinXP

The fixed Win7 one, you've verified that it boots by itself.

You could also verify that the WinXP one boots OK by itself.
If it doesn't work by itself, it might require "fixmbr" or
"fixboot C:", with the WinXP disk connected by itself, and
the WinXP installer CD used to access the recovery console
(command prompt).

*******

The WinXP install CD is a bit of a pain when repairing things,
because during the scan for the OS partition, selecting the
partition is easy, but then it asks for the administrator password.
You might be using a different password for your regular account,
than for the administrator account.

For example, to view the accounts, from a WinXP Command Prompt
window while the OS is running, you can type

control userpasswords2

and it sill show you a table of accounts. For example, mine has

User Name Group
Administrator Administrators
Paul Administrators

There is also a tick box in that panel, for not having to
enter a password during startup login. If you define passwords
for the accounts, a side effect might be that it'll be looking
for the password at startup time.

If you can get to "control userpasswords2" OK, then you
could even reset the Administrator password. It's when you
can't get into that control panel at all, that there's a
problem. You can see, with these details above, that
the recovery console requiring a password, can be a big
deal. Some people have never used their administrator
account before, and haven't a clue what the password is.

I hope zero work is necessary on the WinXP one, and that
it just boots. But at least I'm feeling pretty good right
now, that you've got one working OS disk. Because with
that Win7 disk, you[ll be able to post your questions here :-)

Once you're happy each OS is working well, you can clone
them as you want. To clone a larger drive to a smaller drive,
the cloning tool has to understand how to resize things. That's
something you might want to verify about Acronis. The tool I use,
the cloning thing only works if the biggest partition is at
the end of the disk. And some cloners, don't handle resizing
at all, and can't transfer a big disk to a smaller disk, without
a lot of fiddling first. Going from your 80GB to the 160GB
drive, was the easy case.

Paul

Paul
As I said earlier I am happy with the Win 7 installation and don't want to
keep WinXP so is it OK to connect all the drives back up and format the
500GB disk with Win XP on it? The Win 7 was basically a fresh install with
programs that I had on Win XP freshly installed to Win 7 along with
documents and folders that I had on a flash drive.
I take your point about Acronis and will read up about it before cloning.
One last thing will Win 7 run happily in IDE mode or do I need to change
this back to AHCI at some point?
Thanks
Andrew


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"Paul" wrote in message ...

Andrew Wilson wrote:


Paul
Followed your list to the letter and I am extremely pleased to say that
it worked and repaired exactly as you described. I am exceptionally
grateful to you for all the time and effort that you put into this.
What is the next step - connect all the hard drives back up including
the 500GB WinXP drive? I will eventually be wiping this drive and
hopefully cloning the current Win7 80GB drive to the former WinXP 500GB
drive and also a back up to the 160GB drive. The 80GB drive can then be
removed and stored.
Thanks again
Andrew


I'm glad to hear that all went well. The Microsoft repair thing
is a good idea, but there is still room for improvements in it.

80GB Win7 (fixed)

160GB

500GB WinXP

The fixed Win7 one, you've verified that it boots by itself.

You could also verify that the WinXP one boots OK by itself.
If it doesn't work by itself, it might require "fixmbr" or
"fixboot C:", with the WinXP disk connected by itself, and
the WinXP installer CD used to access the recovery console
(command prompt).

*******

The WinXP install CD is a bit of a pain when repairing things,
because during the scan for the OS partition, selecting the
partition is easy, but then it asks for the administrator password.
You might be using a different password for your regular account,
than for the administrator account.

For example, to view the accounts, from a WinXP Command Prompt
window while the OS is running, you can type

control userpasswords2

and it sill show you a table of accounts. For example, mine has

User Name Group
Administrator Administrators
Paul Administrators

There is also a tick box in that panel, for not having to
enter a password during startup login. If you define passwords
for the accounts, a side effect might be that it'll be looking
for the password at startup time.

If you can get to "control userpasswords2" OK, then you
could even reset the Administrator password. It's when you
can't get into that control panel at all, that there's a
problem. You can see, with these details above, that
the recovery console requiring a password, can be a big
deal. Some people have never used their administrator
account before, and haven't a clue what the password is.

I hope zero work is necessary on the WinXP one, and that
it just boots. But at least I'm feeling pretty good right
now, that you've got one working OS disk. Because with
that Win7 disk, you[ll be able to post your questions here :-)

Once you're happy each OS is working well, you can clone
them as you want. To clone a larger drive to a smaller drive,
the cloning tool has to understand how to resize things. That's
something you might want to verify about Acronis. The tool I use,
the cloning thing only works if the biggest partition is at
the end of the disk. And some cloners, don't handle resizing
at all, and can't transfer a big disk to a smaller disk, without
a lot of fiddling first. Going from your 80GB to the 160GB
drive, was the easy case.

Paul
Paul
As I said earlier I am happy with the Win 7 installation and don't want to
keep WinXP so is it OK to connect all the drives back up and format the
500GB disk with Win XP on it? The Win 7 was basically a fresh install with
programs that I had on Win XP freshly installed to Win 7 along with
documents and folders that I had on a flash drive.
I take your point about Acronis and will read up about it before cloning.
One last thing will Win 7 run happily in IDE mode or do I need to change
this back to AHCI at some point?
Thanks
Andrew

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Andrew Wilson wrote:


Paul
As I said earlier I am happy with the Win 7 installation and don't want
to keep WinXP so is it OK to connect all the drives back up and format
the 500GB disk with Win XP on it? The Win 7 was basically a fresh
install with programs that I had on Win XP freshly installed to Win 7
along with documents and folders that I had on a flash drive.
I take your point about Acronis and will read up about it before
cloning. One last thing will Win 7 run happily in IDE mode or do I need
to change this back to AHCI at some point?
Thanks
Andrew

Windows 7 will run on either AHCI or IDE.

The Windows 7 on my laptop is running in AHCI, because that's
how Acer shipped it.

The Windows 7 running in a VM (the kind of thing I used for
testing your setup) uses IDE, and also works just fine.

Either choice is acceptable. As long as you use the registry
re-arm procedure, you can shut down and change modes if you
want in the BIOS.

*******

I would do the cloning step, in the order that preserved
your escape options as well as possible. So you always have
at least one known-working OS to work with. Life is a lot
better, with some options at your disposal. For example,
I happened to leave multiple OS drives connected one day,
while installing an OS... and it overwrote the MBR on
the wrong hard drive. I couldn't boot. Fortunately, I
knew at the time, what needed to be done, without looking
that up on the web. So it only cost me "ten minutes and
a few swear words" to fix it.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message ...

Andrew Wilson wrote:


Paul
As I said earlier I am happy with the Win 7 installation and don't want to
keep WinXP so is it OK to connect all the drives back up and format the
500GB disk with Win XP on it? The Win 7 was basically a fresh install with
programs that I had on Win XP freshly installed to Win 7 along with
documents and folders that I had on a flash drive.
I take your point about Acronis and will read up about it before cloning.
One last thing will Win 7 run happily in IDE mode or do I need to change
this back to AHCI at some point?
Thanks
Andrew

Windows 7 will run on either AHCI or IDE.

The Windows 7 on my laptop is running in AHCI, because that's
how Acer shipped it.

The Windows 7 running in a VM (the kind of thing I used for
testing your setup) uses IDE, and also works just fine.

Either choice is acceptable. As long as you use the registry
re-arm procedure, you can shut down and change modes if you
want in the BIOS.

*******

I would do the cloning step, in the order that preserved
your escape options as well as possible. So you always have
at least one known-working OS to work with. Life is a lot
better, with some options at your disposal. For example,
I happened to leave multiple OS drives connected one day,
while installing an OS... and it overwrote the MBR on
the wrong hard drive. I couldn't boot. Fortunately, I
knew at the time, what needed to be done, without looking
that up on the web. So it only cost me "ten minutes and
a few swear words" to fix it.

Paul
Connected back all drives. Successfully cloned the Win7 80GB drive to the
150GB drive. Booted up with the 150GB and it's running perfectly. Next step
is to clone the 150GB to the 500GB and use this as the master and dump WinXP
for good. As I have said before I can't thank you enough for assisting me
and would have been stuffed without your help. I must admit there were more
than a few naughty words from me when things weren't going to plan!
Thanks again
Andrew


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