The Pains of cloning vista

[Aeridyne]

Ok, so i have run into this problem on no less than 3 systems thus far. My own, my gf dad, and my friends did it too.

On each one, if you try to move the partitions, using gparted, part magic, or acronis disk director vista is fubar and even using the recovery off the vista disk will not fix the problem.

On some of the installs this recovered the xp partition but vista remained unbootable, or was severely gimped.

I have tried to use acronis to backup vista to move to a larger hard drive and that is my and my friends problem, if you simply try to clone or move the vista partition at all it totally messes up, unlike xp which transfers across disks no problem.

what can i do to fix vista on these machines to get it booting and working again?

 

[Nothinman]

Changing the order of the partitions changes the way Vista sees them and likely messes up the drive letters which would obviously cause issues. It's been that way with Windows forever and is just something that you don't do.

If you're just cloning the filesystem to another disk then that's a different story, but it would still likely have to be the same partition number on the new disk to work right.

 

[Looney]

What do you mean 'move the partition?' Are you trying to backup Vista to another, bigger, HDD, and then using that HDD? Or are you moving Vista to another partition on another, bigger, HDD? If it's the former, then it shouldn't be a problem. I just did this same thing last week (cloned my Vista from an 80GB drive to a 160GB drive).... well almost, except mine was even more complicated; it involved a drive using Bootcamp and running OSX and Vista as well. If it's the latter, then yes, that will cause a problem. Vista bootloader is very very picky.

 

[mojaveron]

Have you tried checking if other people have been having problems with Vista and Acronis at the Acronis web site Forums there is a lot of information there here is a link.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65

 

[Smilin]

What do you mean by "move a partition?" exactly? Give a before/after of what you are doing.

keep in mind vista has a slightly different boot process. If you just move a partition without also copying the MBR (that exists outside the partition) you're shooting yourself in the foot.

 

[Aeridyne]

Originally posted by: Smilin
What do you mean by "move a partition?" exactly? Give a before/after of what you are doing.

keep in mind vista has a slightly different boot process. If you just move a partition without also copying the MBR (that exists outside the partition) you're shooting yourself in the foot.

How exactly do you copy a mbr? or anything else it would need that isn't included on the partiotions?

As for a better explanation of my situations, here we go...

I have just started working with Vista and have already had no less than 3 different machines get totally hosed.

The problem is anytime that vista is moved anywhere it will freak out.

Three examples...

1) used gparted on a disk that had 2 partitions, xp and vista. just borrowed space from the xp to make the vista part. bigger, no probs in gparted, but when reboot vista comes up and says that it needs to run recovery and insert the disk, xp boots fine. Put in the vista disk, it runs, and says it fixed something, the vista boot loader comes up now, but when vista boots it comes up to the login, then the desktop only loads to a blue screen with a mouse pointer, but you can run task manager and use the run command to run things, its just the desktop that is messed up...

2) On my own machine, I installed xp and vista to 2 seperate partitions. Then I used acronis to make backups, when restored in place to the existing partitions it worked ok, but if you delete the partitions and make new ones of nearly identical size (9.997 gb to 10 gb) the restored images will not boot. Neither of the OSs will load, no boot loader, just straight to a black screen with a blinking cursor

3) My friend joe's machine. He simply wanted to take a 300 gig drive and clone it to a 500 gig drive, so he used acronis to clone disk (even keeping the partitions the same exact size), seemed to work ok, but again neither OS would boot. Using the vista recovery does nothing, using the xp recovery to fixboot and fixmbr gets xp booting, but no longer has a boot loader to choose between the two of course, tried to muck around with bcdedit.exe and didn't get anywhere, don't know how to fix vista?


Thats my predicament... xp transfers disk easily, but it doesn't seem like vista does... Anyone got any fixes for any of these? Or maybe a nice gui for bcdedit considering it is so hard to use and is way beyond me?

thanks.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I recently used acronis to move my vista 32 partition from a seagate 200gb drive to a new hitachi 500gb drive. When I tried to boot off the cloned partition it wouldn't boot however booting off the vista dvd and using the tools repaired it so I could boot like normal. Once booted however I had to reactivate vista which was no problem. A week later I decided that I wanted to move to vista 64 so I did a clean install, activated online and here I am.

 

[Aeridyne]

Originally posted by: Puffnstuff
I recently used acronis to move my vista 32 partition from a seagate 200gb drive to a new hitachi 500gb drive. When I tried to boot off the cloned partition it wouldn't boot however booting off the vista dvd and using the tools repaired it so I could boot like normal. Once booted however I had to reactivate vista which was no problem. A week later I decided that I wanted to move to vista 64 so I did a clean install, activated online and here I am.

From what i've read it seems that when using only vista the repair works much nicer, but when you are dual booting, it seems to be much more sinister.

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
The problem is anytime that vista is moved anywhere it will freak out.

Have you ever tried using Vista's built-in CompletePC Backup to do the cloning?

I've restored CPB backups to different size drives and what not with no problems. I really think it is superior to Acronis.

 

[Looney]

Maybe when the first time you fscked up you should have read up on what you did wrong, and you wouldn't have fscked up the other 2 times.

 

[kmmatney]

I had the RC candidate release of Vista hose up my system. I even used a whole clean separate hard drive to install it on, thinking I would get a clean dual-boot setup. However, Vista still managed to hose up my windows XP installation on my other hard drive. When I removed Vista, windows XP would n longer boot, and required a repair install and re-activation (and by this time, a phone call to Microsoft). What a pain...

 

[Nothinman]

How exactly do you copy a mbr?

Personally? dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/mbr bs=512 count=1.

But I really can't think of a reason that I've had to do that in a very long time.

 

[circuitpro]

In order to clone a VISTA32 OR VISTA64 drive, edit the BCD (Boot Configuration Data) file in the following way:

b. Boot the Master drive and log in as a user with administrative rights.

c. Press the Start button (the Microsoft Orb) and type cmd.exe at the search window. The cmd.exe application will show up at the top of the box. Right-click it and run it as an administrator (or with elevated rights). A DOS window will open.

d. Now type the following commands in the DOS Window:

Bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot <enter>
Bcdedit /set {default} device boot <enter>
Bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot <enter>
Bcdedit /set {memdiag} device boot <enter>

If you typed these correctly, with admin rights, the response will be successful in each case. These commands change the BCD file in a way that allows Vista to boot even if some of the drive?s geometry has changed. It will not cause a rollback, will not request the license key again, or perform a SID change pass.

e. Now shut down the computer and disconnect the Master drive. Your Master drive is now ready for cloning.

It should not be necessary to repeat the above procedure, and your system will remain clone-able. (The commands shown above are scriptable, or can be placed in a .bat file for painless execution in the future, if you desire.)