Boot Loader Options don't show after reinstall

DaveJ

Member
I have XP pro installed on the first hard drive, and Vista installed on the 2nd hard drive. All worked well until my Vista drive crashed a few days ago. At that point, despite having removed the bad drive (so I only had a drive with XP on it), I still saw the boot loader with options to boot to XP and Vista (of course only the XP option worked). I got a new hard drive, and restored a Norton ghost image of the original Vista drive onto it. This drive is mounted as drive V in my XP OS, and is marked as Active. In EasyBCD, I removed the old entry for Vista, and added a new one pointing to drive V as the location of the OS. I saved this entry. Now when I boot up, I don't see the boot loader options, it just boots direct into XP. Can somebody tell me why I'm not seeing the option to boot to Vista when I boot up. Also in EasyBCD, when I look at the settings, I see Vista as entry #2, but with drive U (not V as I specified when I added the entry)
 
U = unavailable, undefined, unknown (or any other un-word you can think of) not Drive U:\.
Go into EasyBCD "change settings" and alter the drive to V in there.
 
Thanks for the reply. My problem was that Norton Ghost images don't work too well with Vista (at least the 2003 version of NG). So I had to reinstall Vista from scratch, then all worked well.
 
You're the 3rd clone problem poster this week; the others were both using different Acronis products though.
If you're interested in the background behind the problems of cloning Vista (compared to previous Windows), you can read about it here. It might help if you want to clone a heavily developed or customized Vista in the future, which wouldn't be so quickly recreated with a reinstall.
 
Sorry if i'm losing it here but I'm still using Acronis TI 10 which I believe came out prior to Vistas launch. Haven't had a problem with it at all, though I always do an offline image of the hard drive. These products are supposedly capable of copying sector by sector if case need be, so filesystem and OS shouldn't matter. For what its worth, I've cloned a fully encrypted volume using TI on several occasions.
 
The problem isn't replacing an existing system with a backup copy. That's always going to work ( barring bad media or faulty copy of course).
The problem is using the clone as a second OS, with the other still in place, if the cloning software has also copied the disk id. Pre-Vista windows used the BIOS disk numbering to locate the OS at boot, but Vista uses the disk id, so having duplicates causes a problem.
I've just acquired a copy of Paragon Drive Copy 9.0 (free on this month's PCWorld magazine), which says it's fully Vista compatible, so it might not have this problem, though I don't intend to make any duplicate copies anyway to find out whether it circumvents the problem. I assume it's also capable of handling the latest partition formatting that a Vista formatted new HDD uses.
 
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