I just did my first restore and encountered the following problem. The restore of the image went fine and "seemed" to be successful though I am not sure about the following two lines in the report: "System BCD was not found. Boot.ini has been patched".

However, when trying to boot up using the new set-up I was given the choice between Windows and Windows Xp Professional. Choosing XP professional I am told "missing or corrupt file - windows root\system32.hal.dll". (Choosing Windows did not do anything)

What should I do next?

I am using XP and used an image I had stored on a separate drive containing only data. The drive I wanted to restore to is a new drive, formatted as basic, NTFS with three partitions - My restore choice was default ( dont' remember all details but I think it was with MBR from image file and signature etc).

I did a follow up test with a new image and otherwise similar conditions: The drive that is meant to receive the image for restoration is not in the pc when doing the image. For restoration I swap the drives, change bios to ensure that the sequence is right and this time I noted the restore options and did not tick anything. The error codes were the same:

While I am getting faster in opening my case, taking out one drive and putting in the other drive, it is a bit of a nuisance. Is it actually necessary to do so or am I creating unnecessary work for me in this respect? Any help will be appreciated :)

 Hi Beethoven

 Not sure why  you are getting the missing file, but the drive swapping exercise is not necessary as far as I am concerned.  I just restore to the drive I've imaged.  You are probably dong this "just in case"   If I am right you have FDISR, and that is your Just in case.

 
Pete

 

Hi Peter, glad to meet you here too :) You are right, I do have FDISR but I am not sure how this would help me in this case. If the restore on the original drive also fails, would that not wipe out my snapshot or reboot option? Sure, I could go back to my archives but would still have to rebuild XP first, install FDISR and then import the archive. My understanding was to use SP to cover the risk of hardware failure. In this case I am not even using a different pc, only a different drive. I would not be so scared if I had as many successful restores as you have but keep in mind that I have not had any success yet. I am not blaming the software but suspect that something I do is wrong but unless I can figure this out and restore successfully a few times, I have to be cautious.

I tried three more restores and all end up with the same error message. I am not sure where I am going wrong? Could someone please clarify that I do not have to do a HIR in this case ( I am only swapping drives). Also, I have now tried with ticking MBR from image file and MBR from original windows - the effect is the same - I am still getting this ..hal.dll error corde. Finally I ticked restore disk signature and restore hidden track though I did not understand what these are. Looking at the manual they seem to be for server editions, so I assumed they are not necessary for my "simple" restore but I tried any. It's always the same error when trying to reboot with the new image.

Hi Beethoven,

I doubt that the dll file is actually missing. I suspect that it simply can't be located because your boot.ini file does not point to the correct partition number for your OS. The OS will therefore not boot.

I have to manually edit my boot.ini file to point to the correct location when ever I restore my primary OS from my multi-boot drive to a single boot drive. I make images of my primary OS on my multiboot drive. That OS happens to be on parition number 2 and the boot.ini file is as shown here:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

I sometimes restore that OS to a different, single-boot hard disk where it winds up being partition number 1. I have to manually edit the boot.ini file to change the two twos in the above to two ones. After that, the OS will boot properly on the single-boot hard disk. I do NOT use the MBR or the first tract from the image file because the source disk layout is totally different and includes a boot manager.

You can check out what your boot.ini file indicates by booting from the SP CD. Using the SP disk map view, right click on the partition where your OS is and select "edit boot.ini" from the drop down menu.

You should not have to do anything with HIR in just restoring to a different hard disk.

I am not sure how partitions are numbered but think it is in the order they were created. At least that's the way it appears from my disks. In other words, partition number 1 may not be the first physical partition on the disk. You'll have to figure out what partition numbers apply in your case.

Rod

Rod,

thanks for that. You were right - the boot.ini caused the problem and I have now successfully restored my image.

However, I am still hoping to understand better where I went wrong and how to read the error messages. I have to admit I did not quite understand the info from the boot.ini of my partition. I checked this as you suggested and this was the info:

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows"

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

As it was slightly different from your set-up and my understanding of non-existent, I did not know how to modify this.

My drive was originally partitoned into : F: 15 gb (intended for later playing with Ubuntu), G: 80 gb (new OS) plus 8gb unallocated space, H: 390 gb for Data with G as the active drive.

Given your comments I decided to get rid of the F-drive and reformatted both F and G as one new partition. I then used the CD recovery environment to create a new partition at the beginning and set this active. When I restored my image, I looked at the log and this time it said:

101 System BCD not found, 109 Boot.ini is valid, no patching required

After swapping the drives and rebooting my system loaded fine.

I am still interested to find out what "System BCD not found" means, what patching ini means as in my previous attempts this was done but did not lead to success and finally how I should manually deal with the boot.ini. At the moment my new drive is just for testing, so I am happy to format and reformat or resize. Eventually though I might want to organise the drive into three partions as originally planned with the first two partitions intended to be bootable.

Rod,

To answer your final question, the System BCD is something that is only present in Windows Vista.  The message 'System BCD not found' is not really an error, and only indicates that you were not restoring a Vista image.

The boot.ini tells the system which partition to find the operating system on.  If ShadowProtect determines, after restoring, that the boot.ini points to a partition with a partition number other than the one it just restored to, it will patch it with an additional entry that points to the correct partition.  This will sometimes cause two boot entries to appear, one of which is the old one (that no longer works), and one of which is the new one.  Removing the old entry is easily done by booting into Windows, running 'msconfig', and click the 'Check all boot paths' button on the BOOT.INI tab.

 

thanks kevin for helping me. Regarding the boot issue - I am not sure I fully understand. I was able to check the boot ini via the recovery cd and stated the result in the previous post. Which of the entries is wrong and should be deleted? With respecat to booting into windows and running msconfig, I just did that "from my working" system and noticed the check all boot paths option. That's easy enough, however if my system does not boot in the first place, how would I access this then?