We are migrating a system to new hardware.

We booted to the ShadowProtect Desktop v3 CD and imaged the two partitions to a USB hard drive.

We booted to the ShadowProtect IT Edition v3 CD to image a larger hard drive with the original two partitions.

We used HIR for the new motherboard controller driver.

When we reboot to boot from the newly imaged HDD we get a blinking cursor in the top left.

Boot from the SPITEd. CD and use the file browser and the drive shows a partition of C:\ on the new HDD with all of the OS and user files there,

What did I miss?

Philip

Try to restore hidden track, MBR and disk signature. That blinking and then nothing looks like you forgot to tick MBR at least. If HIR did not fully prepare the system for the new hardware you would usually get some NTLDR and early windows boot up messages (maybe even graphical with moving progress bar) and then a BSOD or sudden reboot or the like. If you succeed please post back so others can profit, too.

That's exactly right.  This behavior does indicate a problem with either the BIOS (unlikely) or the MBR code section.

Rather than re-run the image restore just to get a good MBR code section, you can just boot the Windows Install CD for the version of windows that you just restored and go to the Recovery console and run the following commands:

mbrfix /drive 0 fixmbr
fixboot C:

 

 

I took screenshots of each step ... so here we are with the drive selection:

 

Here are the recovery settings:

.

I thought that restoring the original MBR would not work in this scenario because the drive sizes are different?

And, the disk signature I was also unsure of so I left it unselected.

Again, I can browse the contents of the drive via the built-in File Explorer. The drive has taken C: and has everything. But, after POST, all I see is a blinking cursor.

I have seen this behaviour with Ghost, and will try the fix for it ... Fdisk /MBR.

Any further info would be appreciated!

Philip

Sorry ... I should have paid a bit more attention to your suggestion.

I will try that first.

Philip

Don't worry the MBR will contain the correct information. Your thinko seems to be that the MBR only contains partition location/size/.. information. That is only half the truth. It contains also a very small bootstrap code that will load active partition's boot sector code. Blame IBM anno 1981 A.D. or something for that concept... 

When ShadowProtect restores the MBR, it doesn't restore the entire 512 bytes of the MBR verbatim.  This would be destructive as it would wipe out your partition table.  Instead, whenever ShadowProtect restores an MBR, it is only restoring the bootstrap code section of the MBR (the first 446 bytes).

There is an MBR restore failure issue  in 3.0 which has been fixed in 3.1, and so far has only been reported by two users.  Perhaps you're the third.  The solution is fairly simple, and is to do as I described earlier.  When you try to boot and only see the blinking cursor on the screen, just boot your Windows Install CD (for the same version of windows that you just restored) and select the option to use the Recovery Console feature of the Windows Install CD, and within the recovery console use the mbrfix.exe utility to fix the MBR.  IIRC, the syntax to do this is (mbrfix.exe /drive 0 fixmbr) or something like that.  It also wouldn't hurt to run the "fixboot C:" command.

For more information on the MBR structure, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
 

All smiles here! :D

As per your instructions with a little help from MS Fixmbr:

fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0

Then:

fixboot c:

We now have a functional XP Pro SP2 station we can proceed to update drivers on.

Definitely need to verify the local admin password before carrying out this procedure!

Thanks folks,

Philip

Great!

Update for Vista:

Boot to DVD, system recovery and command prompt.

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot

Restart.

I did not see an IT Edition 3.1 ISO download yet? Is it available?

Thanks,

Philip

Thanks for the feedback!

I believe the 3.1 ISO will be available for download later this week or sometime over the weekend.