Other Norton Products

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I searched the forum for 'DISKPART' and not found so should warn other users of bad experience when I used NGH 15 to clone partitions to a new drive. An old drive had only days to live so I installed a new drive and formatted required partitions. With NGH I made a one off backup to a third healthy drive then used 'Recover Computer' to copy the backup to the partitions on the new drive.
In each case my target drive disappeared completely accompanied by a blue screen and this mucked up the boot loader as well.
Fortunately I was able to boot up the third drive (just a small recovery installation) and could see in diskmgmt.msc that the reason for the blank drive was a conflicting signature. Googling the problem showed I could open cmd as admindistrator and use DISKPART to list the drives and sure enough the target drive had the same ID as the old drive. It is possible to fix this by guessing a new random eight digit hexadecimal number for an ID and that fixed the problem after a restart.

[DaveH]

After cloning a drive, either by restoring an image or doing a copy drive, the new drive must be booted by it'self the first time.

If you still have the new and old drive connected you may want to seperate them and see if the new one will boot the system when used alone.

Dave

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Thanks DaveH, in fact as the plan was to toss out the bad drive I suspected it would be solved that way once I knew the problem but it sure was disconcerting to see the drive gone. What I would really do in future is check and make a note of the ID with DISKPART so I can just restore the correct ID.

Here is a good link about DISKPART http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2011/11/08/3463572.aspx