Ghost 14: Destination Drive not booting

notebene · ‎01-23-2009

I pick the 'make bootable' and 'copy mbr' options when I clone the drive to the other drive. I pull the old primary drive out (i have drive bays) and reboot with the other drive, but it tells me no MBR was found.

I'm cloning from an 'extended' partition on a 500G hard drive split in half, and it's Windows 7. The primary partition has another Windows 7, which I've delete most of the files it would allow me to delete off it (for other reasons I won't discuss), so is most likely not even bootable at this point, but it comes up as an OS to boot to when I start my computer (even though I don't pick it anymore). Now that I've cloned the Windows 7 OS sitting on the extended partion of the 500G drive to a 200G drive, if I leave the other drive in the top bay (200G in the 2nd bay with a newly cloned copy of the Windows 7 OS from the 2nd partion of the big drive), my boot manager comes up with 3 picks: 2 Windows 7 and 1 Windows Vista. Funny it calls my new Windows 7 clone a Vista, but I'll assume that is because 14 came out before knowing what Windows 7 was, and there is no patch for that yet.

At any rate, I can boot by picking it from the list of 3 OSs to boot from (leaving the big drive in), but that concerns me that I can't boot off that other drive when it is the 'only' drive in my system, telling me I don't have an MBR (even though I picked it when copying the drive), because my ultimate goal is to blow away that 2nd partition on the 500G drive and make one big partition, and copy the 200G back to the 500G.

So why is my drive not booting up, do you suppose? Both are SATA (it's possible the 200 is 150/mb, but that shouldn't matter, it's just slow is all).

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

notebone,

Are you using the Microsoft Boot Manager? If so, you don't have an independent multi-boot.

notebene · ‎01-23-2009

I guess I will assume the answer to that is 'yes', I'm using microsoft's boot manager. I installed Windows 7 on the logical partition. I then

installed another version of the OS on the primary partition, and it was at that point that it gave me the menu. I didn't install partition

magic or use another 3rd party boot menu system, so I'll assume based on that, I'm using Microsofts.

How does that effect/impact what I'm trying to do? Creating a clone of one OS on a partition to a stand alone drive and asking it to boot

for me?

Side note: This is the 2nd forum I've been on where the edit doesn't automatically wrap at the end of the line. Odd.

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

notebone,

Microsoft's Boot Manager just makes things difficult, IMHO. The boot files for your cloned OS are in another partition. You need two OS partitions for that clone to boot. Can the clone see the OS with the boot files?

notebene · ‎01-23-2009

I will say 'no', it can't.

Seems like there ought to be an option to create a clone of a partition to a full hard drive and ignore any boot managers it's part so it boots as a stand alone drive, but I suppose my desire is the exception and not the rule.

Really want to resize this thing and move my good OS back without having to be stuck with it for eternity.

What about if I back it up to an image, and then use a rescue disk to restore that image to the other drive. Would that make it work?

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

That HD won't boot as a sole HD. If it is installed along with the HD containing the boot files, it may boot.

If you plan to do a lot of multi-booting I suggest a good boot manager. One that can boot OS from any HD and OS in logical volumes in extended partitions and hide all other OS. You can add and delete OS at will. It doesn't affect the remaining OS. I use BootIt NG. XOSL is a free alternative.

notebene · ‎01-23-2009

I guess this unfortunately ends the help I'll get here, unless there is a suggestion for a utility that will allow me to pull a partition out of a microsoft boot manager so it boots stand-alone?

All the data is there, and the drive is copied, and it boots when I start up with the drive that has the boot manager as the primary drive, so all is well and good with the drive.

It surprises me there isn't just a utility that you can run that tells the drive it's no longer part of a boot manager, and can now boot on it's own. That is, to rebuild it's boot record (or whatever the proper terminology is) so it's his own entity.

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

If you want, you can move the boot files into that partition. Use a variation of of these methods. Let us know how you fare.

http://www.themudcrab.com/separatevistaxp.php

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=324

notebene · ‎01-23-2009

The mudcrab solution was interesting and useful, learned a lot from it. As it turns out, however, in my case I could do it all with Ghost 14 and the Windows Recovery disk 'without' having to mess with bcdedit myself.

I effectively had two problems happening at same time. I had originally ghosted to my new drive, which ended up not getting the boot manager and sector (since I was cloning the partition which didn't contain it) and was originally able to get through the bootmgr not found problem by booting to Windows recovery, letting it do it's first fix, reboot, doing the 'fix windows startup' option, then letting it boot to the new drive on the 3rd boot.

The 'other' problem I was having was the 'preparing your desktop' problem, which I found in another area of these forums, and turns out I could have avoided that whole thing if I had simply cloned to an 'unallocated' partition.

So I started all over again, trying it that way, and it worked beautifully! After I booted up on the smaller 'temp' drive, I had put the other drive as the 2nd drive, and was able to go in and blow away all those other partitions until I had a nice bit 500g hard drive, then ghosted again from my temp drive to that drive, and after shutting down, put the 500g up top and put my old 500g backup drive back in bay 2 (temp drive back on the shelf) and I'm in business.

Thanks for sticking with me on this one :)