[Susan G]

Hi-

I had a dual-boot Windows XP/Windows 7 system working fine. Each OS was installed on a different drive, and I had a choice which to boot to on startup. I'd installed Windows 7 on an older Maxtor IDE drive and it was a little noisy so I decided to clone it to a newer SATA drive using Acronis True Image. I tested it for a while to make sure the cloned drive worked, and it was fine.

My drives were all out of the PC case during this for a totally unrelated reason, and when I hooked them back up I started having problems. I don't think I installed them in the original order, and maybe that's the problem, but I've tried all available boot disk priorities. My motherboard is an ASUS PB5-E, if that helps.

I still get the option to boot into XP or Windows 7, but only the XP boot works. Windows 7 comes up with a blank screen or a "recovered" option, but none of the recovery options work.

So now I have 2 drives with identical Windows 7 installations, along with a bunch of programs and registry settings, etc., but I can't boot into Windows 7.

The BIOS recognizes all of my SATA drives, as does Device Manager in XP.

If I remove the original Win 7 (IDE) boot disk and use the cloned drive I get the "Windows 7 (recovered)" boot option, but once it gets past the Welcome screen, the wheel spins for a while, then the screen goes dark.

If I boot in Safe Mode and choose "Repair Computer" it goes through all the tests and finds no errors.

If I boot using the original (IDE) boot disk I get the same Win 7 (recovered) boot option, but the Repair fails, complaining about an unnamed device driver.

I must have done something wrong somewhere along the way, but I'd think with 2 "bootable" Win 7 drives one would work!

Any suggestions before I try a System Restore or re-install Win 7?

Thanks!

-Susan

[yeshuas]

Can you post a screen shot of your Disk Management, and your boot.ini

[Susan G]

Hi yeshuas-

Update since my last post:

I got the IDE drive working, so I can now dual-boot into XP or Win 7 (I think -- I'll have to restart once more to be sure).

So that's definite progress, but I still have the initial issue. I cloned the IDE Win 7 drive to a SATA drive using Acronis True Image Home 2010, and even though the "Automatic" option indicated it would make the drive bootable, I can't boot from it.

The IDE drive is noisy, so I'd really like to use a SATA drive instead.

Thanks-

-Susan

[NT50]

If you ahve your Visat DVD, disconnect he IDE drive and boot to the Vista DVD and do a startup repair.

[Susan G]

Hi NT50-

Thanks for the suggestion, but I already tried that. It's Windows 7, and when I run the startup repair on the cloned drive it says it can't find any problems.

I'm going to try the clone again from the Rescue CD.

Thanks-

-Susan

[NT50]

If you have to copy the file AND folder form the DVD "bootmgr" (file) and "Boot" (folder & contents) to the root of the win 7 drive. Then do a startup repair.

[Susan G]

Hi Jeff-

I'm hoping the Rescue CD will take care of it. At this point I'm waiting for definitive word from Acronis re when to disconnect my original boot drive, since I don't remember seeing an option to shut down after the cloning was complete, and I think that's where I messed up in the first place. This is with ATI Home 2010, in case anyone here's familiar with that.

Thanks-

-Susan