Revised: April 22, 2012
A problem occurs when restore a bootable partition image to another location and then boot from that location. The partition which was the boot partition when the image was made will retain the C: drive designation, and the new boot partition will assign itself another letter. This is a “schizophrenic” system – who knows where new software would install, etc.
A problem occurs when restore a bootable partition image to another location and then boot from that location. The partition which was the boot partition when the image was made will retain the C: drive designation, and the new boot partition will assign itself another letter. This is a “schizophrenic” system – who knows where new software would install, etc.
The classic fix for this problem is to unplug the original drive before the first boot of the “new” partition. A more elegant regedit procedure follows, including other routine steps required:
- Restore image to new partition
- The new partition will have the same name as the original. Rename it to my standard “DriveID Partition#”
- Verify that it is set as active partition
- Assuming the new partition now is x:, “bcdboot x:\windows /s x:” (check: bcdedit /store x:\boot\bcd). This is not necessary if are also restoring the 100MB System partition and marking it as active
- Regedit
- Click Hkey_Local_Machine
- Click File / Load Hive
- X:\Windows\System32\Config\System (i.e. registry to modify) (live registry is HKLM\System\Mounted Devices)
- “Give the baby a name” like XXX
- Open the key HKLM/XXX/Mounted Devices
- Fix any problem, or just delete them all (can’t delete (default))
- Remove C: from source partition
- Add C: to target (or will happen during first boot?)
- Remove C: from source partition
- Add C: to target (or will happen during first boot?)
- Click XXX
- Click File / Unload Hive
- Restart, edit BIOS to boot from new partition
The "normal" way to use Acronis is to image the current boot partition, but I've always had a gut feeling that it may somehow be better to image my primary (SSD) Windows installation while booted from elsewhere. I will probably continue to do both as long as I continue to multi-boot.
If the restore is due to a disk boot failure but files are still accessible, consider copying the following:
- Bookmarks
- Desktop
- Taskbar (pinned)
- Start menu (all locations, incl pinned)
I should remind myself here to be more diligent about test restores. My SSD stopped booting 4/4/2012, but restores of recent backups revealed many orphaned files and would not boot. I.e. the file system was damaged in a way that it would still boot, but not image properly. The most recent backup I had that would restore and boot was from 2/25/2012, and even that had chkdsk errors for unindexed files.
Related to this, I should also remind myself not to rely on a "testing" partition for very long, as it becomes more difficult to transfer back to the active (SSD) installation.
Separately, not resulting from a restore, I had non-boot and "This Copy of Windows Is Not Genuine" issues after using EaseUS to re-size one of my Win7 partitions. Following the above procedures fixed. (I assume the problems resulted from the partition GUID changing)
If the restore is due to a disk boot failure but files are still accessible, consider copying the following:
- Bookmarks
- Desktop
- Taskbar (pinned)
- Start menu (all locations, incl pinned)
I should remind myself here to be more diligent about test restores. My SSD stopped booting 4/4/2012, but restores of recent backups revealed many orphaned files and would not boot. I.e. the file system was damaged in a way that it would still boot, but not image properly. The most recent backup I had that would restore and boot was from 2/25/2012, and even that had chkdsk errors for unindexed files.
Related to this, I should also remind myself not to rely on a "testing" partition for very long, as it becomes more difficult to transfer back to the active (SSD) installation.
Separately, not resulting from a restore, I had non-boot and "This Copy of Windows Is Not Genuine" issues after using EaseUS to re-size one of my Win7 partitions. Following the above procedures fixed. (I assume the problems resulted from the partition GUID changing)
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