XP Pro stuck on welcome screen after acronis clone disk

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katjaxmusic

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I have an acer 9920G, 2x250GB HDD, intel centrino core2 duo 2.4GHz T7700 processor, NVidia GeForce 8660M, 4GB DDR2, came with vista home premuim (with a hidden EISA partition, whish is still there but i cant access it since i put xp on it!)

my acer came with vista, and after a very long 2 weeks of searching and reinstalling, i finally got xp and all drivers working perfectly (no actual xp drivers available).

so when it was all working perfectly, i downloaded the trial version of acronis true image home 11, and what i thought i was doing was cloning my hard drive to an external 3.5" hard drive as a back up...But...ACRONIS MOVED IT!

the option i chose in acronis was "clone disk"

when i rebooted my laptop, there was no operating sytem.
so...
ive went out and bought a usb sata 2.5" external drive, and had a look at the drive on another laptop to see what the state of the drive is.
Acronis left a big unpartitioned space.

so, i thought i would have a go at manually copying the files over from the usb 3.5" to the new usb 2.5" sata drive, but "machinekey" in "Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys" wouldnt copy over... everything else has copied fine.
(i copied the partitions also to the same size too)

i then put the 2.5" manually copied drive into my acer, and i get to the welcome screen and i can still move the mouse, but it stays like it until you decide to hard shut it.

should i clone the 3.5" to the 2.5" again using acronis true image?
will acronis actually even do that???
will clone an external drive to an external drive?
and will it wipe the 3.5" 1st backup?

safe mode even gets stuck in the same place.
(and every type of startup)

could anbody please help me, ive been doing this for 3 days now...PLEASE???

i dont mind doing a fresh install of windows, but installing the drivers is hard work. is there a way to either get my blue screen working, or a fresh install replacing the drivers and stuff. im not woried about the programs, i can reinstall them.

this not because i cant be bothered to do another install, but because im not sure that i can get it working again because i cant remeber in what order i installed the drivers, and which i forced where and all that long stuff!

please please help me xxx
 
when in doubt read the documentation! ;)

I use Acronis myself tho haven't tried the Clone Disk option yet. But i read from the documentation, Acronis can be used to move (i.e. copy the bootable partition, make the copy bootable and then delete the original) or simply copy but not otherwise change the original. Obviously, you went the "copy and then delete" path.

Seems a couple options

1. i;ve never done it myself but have read it should be possible to boot from an external drive (which is just the situation you have now). We could try that route (see what part is missing that it's not booting from it as is now)

2. Acronis is working as advertised (per its user documentation). Could try the "clone disk" operation again to put it back AND THIS TIME NOT CHOOSE IT DELETE THE ORIGINAL PARTITION

In either case, would like to see the layout for each drive before we do anything. Can you (or you know how) to run XP Disk Management (or similar tool) to report on the layout of both disks currently (i.e. before doing anything to them)
 
errr, well first of all, thank you so much for your brain!
i guessed i must have done something very wrong.

ok, i'll do anything, but could you please tell me how?

is that the disk management in control panel\admin tools?
 
yep

you'll also find you can easily get there by right-click My Computer then select Manage from the context menu. Then you can select disk managment

That will produce a nice display of disk layout info. Unfortunately, XP doesn't provide a nice way to copy / paste that data. But we can work around that.

  • Install SysExporter (but not run it)
  • Then run Disk Management
  • Run SysExporter.
    • It'll show you a window with an upper and lower pane. In the upper pane you can scroll till you see all the entries for the window Computer Managment.
    • Look at the number items in the Items column
    • As you select each line item, note it will display the contents of the window in the lower pane. One of those line items for Computer Management where Items not equal 0 will actually be a copy of the disk layout info.
    • You can now click an item in the lower pane, then hit Items -> Select All, Items -> Copy Selected (tab delimited), and then paste that information so i can see it
 
by the way.. the "Clone Disk" function is used move or copy your boot partition and have Acronis set up to boot from it.

You wanted to simply do a Backup (selecting entire computer). This would create a disk image on on your backup drive (backing up /imaging everything but things you don't need like the pagefile)

If you subsequently did a Recover (entire computer) it would recover the disk image you had backed up.
 
ok, ive set my profile picture on here as my screenshot (coz i dont how/where to upload it to)
0 - is my laptop that im on now
1 - is the cloned (acer 9920 to) 3.5" usb HDD
2 - is the manually copied files and self made partitions to nearly match the cloned drive

i know that the cloned drive had the music part' set as active, i dont know why this is but the oriinal drive was the same (obviously coz its cloned) and it worked fine. although i had to use this usb flash drive to boot it up, it looks for the ntldr thing. (which is on the music partition.)

anyway, im confusing myself.

hope this is what you need to help me x
cheers x
 
ive looked into getting it done at a shop, where they would install a fresh windows and charge me for the licence key, even though i told them that i have an old cd of xp with an ilegal key, but microsoft said that once installed, i can use my vista key as a downgrade, but the shop said no, they wont work with an illeagle xp licence, i have to pay them for a new key.......PIONTLESS, what a waste of money!

im just backing up my files from the cloned drive now, then i'll try another clone using acronis, and hopefully it wont "MOVE" the whole lot again, and hopefully the new drive will boot!

i'll let you know x
 
am just (barely) waking up here

Before you run the clone operation, take a few minutes to look at the doumentation!

Download User Manual (as a .pdf)

Then go through Chapter 14 on "Transferrng the System to a new disk:" (i.e. Clone mode)
 
ok, so i looked at the manual, but im pretty sure i chose to leave the current data, but i cant have because it not there. i cant do a recovery on the original boot because it since been reformatted!

but, my question is, what option do i chose in acronis now, to copy from the 3.5" to the 2.5" both usb drives...?
i think it only gives me the option to image or clone your boot drive!
please tell im wrong???
 
also, i looked at the rocovery options in acronis, and it looks for a "*tib" file, (had to do this via my work laptop looking at the drive via usb, and i think it wants to put it on your boot drive, so thats pants too) ive searched the whole drive through hidden and system files and there are no "*.tib" backup files!

unless... i take this hard drive out, install xp and acronis, and try to recover to the new current drive, but then i still wont find the tib file to start the recovey, but if i get round it somehow, what about if i take out the hard drive just as its about to boot back up after its copied, and put it in the acer!!!
do you think that would work?
 
i'll take a look. but i also need get something else done. so give me a little time and don't be impatient. I'll get back to you within a few hours. Quicker if possible

Be aware that everyone here volunteers their time. Gotta take care of some things for my "day" job <G>
 
by the way, i meant doing the above on the work laptop (packard bell), and changing the drive over to the acer before it boots up.
 
I'm having trouble reading the detail from the Disk Managemen pic in your profile. Could you look at my earlier post about installing SysExporter. This will let you captur/copy the text lines describing each disk volume. U can then paste that info directly into a post on here.
 
no, i cant seem to find an option to clone an exrenal drive to another usb drive!

please help!

i think i need a different solution.
 
whatever we do i still must understand the layouts on those disks. Again, please run SysExporter so you can copy/paste the data i'm asking for into your thread.
 
Volume Layout Type File System Status Capacity Free Space % Free Fault Tolerance Overhead
Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (EISA Configuration) 3.34 GB 1.94 GB 58 % No 0%
Music (D:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Active) 106.19 GB 102.85 GB 96 % No 0%
PQSERVICE Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (EISA Configuration) 13.67 GB 4.91 GB 35 % No 0%
PQSERVICE Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 15.24 GB 13.18 GB 86 % No 0%
S Local Disk (G:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 107.11 GB 95.85 GB 89 % No 0%
S Music (S:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Active) 103.70 GB 101.15 GB 97 % No 0%
Vista (C:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (System) 33.25 GB 21.14 GB 63 % No 0%
XP (E:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Boot) 33.26 GB 7.61 GB 22 % No 0%
XP (H:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 109.68 GB 16.68 GB 15 % No 0%
_OEMBP Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Unknown Partition) 8.00 GB 3.70 GB 46 % No 0%
 
i'm confused. SysExporter lets you copy/paste text. All i want to see are a copy of the text lines as i indicated in my first post for it. (Pasting text into the post is just like typing into post, should be no problems)

Just go thru the line entries in SysExporter's upper pane and look to see what data it displays in the lower pane. At some point, you'll see all the disk volume/layout info displayed in the lower pane, That's when you select all, copy (delimited), paste

Note: SysExporter captures current windows when it starts. So if you started SysExporter FIRST and then Disk Management you would have to click Options -> Refresh to have it refresh the windows data it captured.
 
these...
-Vista (C
-XP (E
_OEMBP - are just my current partitions on this laptop (my dell work laptop)

these (S - for Sata 2.5")...
-S Local Disk (G
-S Music (S
-PQSERVICE Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 15.24 GB 13.18 GB 86 % No 0%
is the manually copied stuff but PQSERVICE has nothing in it

and the others are the original clone of the acer with the real/copied PQSERVIVE that holds the vista files for my acer
 
i'm trying to sort it through (it's a little jumbled)

while i do that, why don't u experiment w/sysexporter again. See the image i attached. i clicked the correct line item in top pane, and it displays disk volume data in lower pane.

If yoiu then
- Click on a line in LOWER pane
- Once line in LOWER pane selected, from the menu at top of Sysexporter window
---> Items -> Select ALL
----> then Items -> Copy Selected (tab delimited)
----> Now simply paste the text anywhere (into notepad or TechSpot for examples)

This will give you the text we're looking for (doing the excersize as may need do it again with something else)

/**** Edit *****/
I attached an image of SysExporter for you
 
can i not just send a screenshot through messenger or something, it says you can put ur msm handle in ur profile on this forum?
 
Volume Layout Type File System Status Capacity Free Space % Free Fault Tolerance Overhead
Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (EISA Configuration) 3.34 GB 1.94 GB 58 % No 0%
Music (D:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Active) 106.19 GB 102.85 GB 96 % No 0%
PQSERVICE Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (EISA Configuration) 13.67 GB 4.91 GB 35 % No 0%
PQSERVICE Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 15.24 GB 13.18 GB 86 % No 0%
S Local Disk (G:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 107.11 GB 95.85 GB 89 % No 0%
S Music (S:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Active) 103.70 GB 101.15 GB 97 % No 0%
Vista (C:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (System) 33.25 GB 21.14 GB 63 % No 0%
XP (E:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Boot) 33.26 GB 7.61 GB 22 % No 0%
XP (H:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 109.68 GB 16.68 GB 15 % No 0%
_OEMBP Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Unknown Partition) 8.00 GB 3.70 GB 46 % No 0%
 
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