I’m urgently and desperately trying to restore my Dell system HDD after it died of mechanical failure. The disk was replaced under warranty with an identical one.
I had the drive split in three partitions: the Vista OS, an XP OS, and the Dell recovery disk. All three were backed up.
When I run a system restore on the completely blank disk (no partition table or anything), the restore seems to run okay. All partitions and the MBR seem to be restored correctly. When I try to boot the machine, neither OS will boot.
I get to the boot options menu where I can pick which OS to boot. If I chose the Vista option, I’m presented with a screen about problems booting and two options: try to repair or boot as normal. Normal booting causes the machine to reboot immediately, and the repair option returns the to boot menu. When I try to boot the XP OS, it hangs with a message about the drive hardware not being configured correctly.
During the restore I chose “restore MBR” and “update drive signature”. The correct partition was selected as active.
I’m at a loss here. I can’t think of a much simpler recovery option (restore to an identical blank HDD), and yet it doesn’t work. This is completely frustrating.
Thanks!