Image glitches

[scottp88]

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I have set to the task of revamping my fathers PC. He uses this PC for all his work so the security and correct backup and storage of all his data is paramount.

He is currently running an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (those good old processors that we all loved so much...)
512MB of DDR333 RAM
ATI Radeon 9200SE 128mb
2 hard disks: The system boot disk is 80GB and the storage disk is 250GB (Both are IDE)

I selected a Gigabyte M61PME-S2 mobo: socket AM2/AM2+
with an AMD5500+ dual core processor and a GB of Corsair DDR2 twin2X RAM for the upgrade.

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In another thread, several cloning/image creators were listed for me. I used the Acronis disk image creator to create an image, however I have a new set of problems...

One of the major problems so far has been the fact that the new motherboard (the new one listed in the original post) only has one IDE channel on it. This, I have had so constantly switch out the secondary HDD ( I will call it E: - the one that has the image of the system drive) with the CD drive. So, to be clear, I have 2 HDDs (C: and E: ) and a CD drive (D: ), and only 2 of them can function at a time at present. the System drive (C: ) has to remain connected obviously. To perform the Image recovery, I connected both HDDs leaving no CD Drive usable in the system. At one point, I was prompted to insert my Windows CD because the system said it had many "unknown" versions of windows files and in order to keep windows running stably, it required the Windows CD to correct the problem. Well, at the time, I did not have a functioning CD drive... So instead I hit cancel to shut down the system and reconnect the the CD drive and attempted to reboot. no luck... it gets to the load screen and then stalls. I also have tried replacing the boot sector via windows repair, also no go.. What can I do????

 

[gbhall]

You can get an IDE cable with two connectors on it. One of the devices will then need to be set as a slave (there is a little tiny shorting plug next to the power connector to be shifted with tweezers). The necessary settings are printed on every hard drive.

A possibly better solution all round is buy a USB drive, such as Seagate freeagent or similar, which are both enormous and cheap, yet completely portable, and need no driver in XP upwards, yet are essentially no slower than a built-in drive.

Oh, sorry, you have an image restore problem....I don't know why the image did not restore without asking for Windows programs, but normally, you would need a startup program to run Acronis at all, such as a floppy disk set, or ideally, a CD as well as the Hard drive with the image, and another which is the target. Could be two separate partitions on one drive as well, but essential point is Acronis restore does not run under Windows itself.

So my suggestion would be, buy a USB drive. Get a friend to copy the image file onto it. With the USB drive attached, boot your PC from the Acronis install CD and restore the image to the HDD. QED.