louarnold

As a final note... I have continued to try several methods of cloning the old 40GB drive to the new 250 GB one. Although I thought I managed to reconnect the booting software to the recovery partition software, I discovered that the recovery software would not work. For some reason, it began formatting a second drive, and hung up doing it. Fortunately everything was backed up, but it was nevertheless a surprise. I must conclude that in this case (for the IBM). there is no way to clone to a larger drive and still have the recovery system operate properly.. I must say that IBM may not be to blame. The system may well have been refurbished by a company other than IBM.

I found a solution to this problem: use BCDEDIT.EXE to point the boot loader to the drive letter of the recovery partition. First some results of tests: 1. I tried taking an single image of the entire drive rather than image each partition. When I restored the image to the larger drive, the original partition sizes were preserved. This means that most of the space on the larger drive was unavailable - some 200 GB in my case. Also preserved was the boot record. When Clonezilla takes images by partition it collects the boot record information, but does not restore it to the larger drive - althought its normal command line parameters tell it to do so. The restoration to the larger drive worked: I could boot normally and still start the recovery program from the start-up screen. This was expected. I then moved the recovery partition with GParted, leaving the system partition as restored. The boot process still worked, but the recovery program could not be activated. This meant that the startup program was looking for the recovery partition in a specific place, and once it was moved, that ended access to it. 2. I used Super GRUB2 Disk to look at the partitions and boot loader/manager. It identified the boot manager as "Windows Vista Bootmgr". This meant that I was dealing with Vista recovery methods despite the OS being Windows XP. 3. I found BCDEdit.exe only in the hidden partition at \Windows\System32. You can see it simply by removing the Hidden flag from the recovery partition. This is done with GParted. When I rebooted back to Windows, I noted the drive letter of the (now visible) partition. I started a command session (Start>Run> Type "cmd"). I first changed to the partition's drive letter - in my case "K:". and then "cd'ed" to the \Windows\System32 folder. I then entered "BCDEDIT" and return. The results were different in the Boot Loader section. The drive letter of the recovery partition in the boot loader section didn't exist. I then used BCDEdit to set the proper drive letter. That solved the problem; the system booted normally and the recovery program could be run without a problem.

Against my better judgement, I will bite... What is the BCD? What does the signature have to do with the problem. The signatures may well be different, but so what? Let's start with those two questions first. By the way: I verified that Clonezilla does not copy the NTFS boot partition. The mbrfix from the Windows install CD, puts a boot record on there, but its of course diffenet from what is on the original disk. And my last comments. The 40 GB drive is the original of a refurbished computer. The system IS Win XP pro SP3. The recovery program's error message IS that its missing winload.exe, and that file IS in the small hidden partition. And i do not have the CD that generated the hard drive.

Clonezilla does do a sector copy. That's plain from the info files it generates. It has also created two files in addition to each partition file: "hda-hidden-data-after-mbr", and "hda-mbr". (These files are generated for both the partitions, and are the same sizes for both partitions.) Clonezilla must, at times, also restore that MBR. If we have the MBR file, then it must contain a link to the hidden partition. How can we fnd that link? Or how do we change the link to point to the recovery partition. Let me ask these questions: Is the MBR in the unallocated areas of the 40 GB drive, or is it in at the start of the main partition? Note that when I use GParted to put a boot flag on a section, there is an immediate increase in used space.

Well, I fail to see how size figures into this, but here is that info: Disk structure as shown by GParted 0.8 I used Clonezilla to cature and restore the images of the two partition - separately. I did not change the OS. Both disks are IDE. All data is on a third non-bootable hard drive, and has been backed up. Original disk: 40 GB structured a delivered: 8 MB unallocated 34 GB NTFS. This is the C drive: Has the boot flag; 22 GB used. 5 MB unallocated 3.5 GB NTFS . This is the "hidden partition" 6 MB unallocated. New disk: 250 GB structured as follows: 228 GB NTFS. This is the C drive.Some part is used. Has the boot flag set. 4 GB NTFS. This the hidden partition. The new drive was connected as a slave with the old drive in place, so that it could be booted from. When the recovery was first done, I could see both patitions and their content. That's how I knew here the "winload.exe" file was. I removed the drive letter for that small partition. That made it invisible to Windows. I then disconnected the old 40 GB drive, leaving the new 250Gb drive, but it would not boot; all I got was a cursor at the top of a blank screen. I used a Windows installation CD and ran fixmbr. That made the new drive bootable. All worked fine. However, when I tested the recovery program at atsratup it said it could not find the winload.exe file. As for the rest, I don't know the answer. But clearly Clonezilla did not copy the MBR over from the original drive. The problem is then how one makes the connection between the MBR and the hidden partition.

I want to swap my small hard drive for a larger one. I managed to clone both the main and recovery partitions and restore them to the larger drive. The system boots fine. But when I choose the Recovery Program in the startup menu, it says it can't find the program winload.exe. I have verified that the program is in the recovery partition. I suspect the startup program can't find the recovery partition because the main partition is now much bigger. How do I configure the system to find the recovery partition? This is a Win XP SP3 system on an IBM ThinkCenter computer.