Not all restored OS images will boot..

[J T]

Hello,

I have a triple boot machine with XPired, Win 7 and Ubuntu, Easy BCD 2.2 is on XPired. XP was the first one on this HD. All OS's boot and run fine as they are. Here's the problem.

When I make an Acronis image of the drive and MBR, and put it on another HD as a 'bare metal restore' the only one that will boot is XP. This puzzles me since I am imaging the MBR along with everything else. I can use the 7 install disc to make 7 boot up, and if I use the Boot Recovery Disc for Linux. I can make Ubuntu boot as well, but that disc puts Grub in charge of booting everything and i don't like that. Really, Grub is on the same partition as Ubuntu. I didn't want it to be in charge of booting the MS OS's. Plus if Grub fails I can still boot to 7.

I understand why 7 won't boot on it's own, all it's boot info was written into XP. I can live with restoring 7 using the install disc, it beats re-installing all my programs again.

Something tells me that EasyBCD is preventing the 'imaged' systems from booting, I know that of the 3 boot entries in EasyBCD the 3rd on for Ubuntu looks odd. Why if I am imaging the whole drive and the MBR only one OS will boot. The original one boots all 3 systems just fine but the imaged one won't. Makes no sense to me. Should I re-install EasyBCD into XP and let it discover the other two OS's?

Thanks in advance to all!

 

[Terry60]

Information in the BCD is considerably less user-friendly than EasyBCD makes it appear.
When EasyBCD says W7 is on drive "D" (e.g.), it's translating the BCD information into human understandable language by referencing the registry drive letter map of the running OS. The actual location stored in the BCD is the UID of the OS, which consists of the unique drive signature assigned by the manufacturer, appended with the physical location of the partition start block address; a string of numbers unintelligible to the human mind but precise and informative to machine intelligence.
If you clone this information onto a different HDD, it will be a precise copy of the location of the OS on the original HDD.
XP is different because all the BCD does is chain to NTLDR and let it do the loading.
Running "startup repair" from your W7 DVD, fixes the BCD by recalculating the UIDs in the BCD using the signature of the new HDD.

There will probably be options in Acronis to do an OS copy which auto-fixes the BCD, but depending on your configuration and your chosen backup method it might cause you other problems of a different nature.
You'll just have to decide which is the least inconvenient/most efficacious method to achieve what you want to do.