Thanks again, Tas. Great pictures.
A few days ago I booted my computer up to find a black screen and a flashing command line cursor (which was inactive but flashing).
Thank heavens I have the knowledge I gained over the years on this forum and the software to go with it.
Booted with a "Minitools Partition Wizard Resue CD" to get the lay of the land, and instead of a system partition and two data partitions, I found two odd sized partitions of unallocated space. A raw drive in other words.
What caused it I have no idea as all seemed well when I shut down the night before.
Anyways, did a search for lost partitions while I had the Minitools disk in, and it found and restored the original 3 partitions within about 15 seconds. All seemed fine but the computer still booted to the flashing cursor.
Rather than spend any more time fixing the booting issue, I decided to restore a Macrium Image of the system partition, which contained the original Master Boot Record which would contain all the relevant partition information needed for the other partitions.
Another success story for Macrium.
I found two odd sized partitions of unallocated space. A raw drive in other words.
I know from experience using some software to wipe free space of a hard disk and then cancelling it can destroy stuff like the MBR, etc. Usually in XP using Windows Recovery Console and using fixmbr will remedy the situation as a last resort. Note that I'm not talking about CCleaner causing this!
Dennis, still no clue what caused the paartitioning event?
I have no idea.
If I'd been messing around with partitions or dual booting I could find some possible reason.
The nearest I can get is maybe relating the problem to messing about with Linux distros on a flash drive. That day I was updating Peppermint 4 installed onto a flash drive with an included 1gb "persistence" file built in, and three quarters way through the quite big update I got this ...
No possible way Peppermint should be writing to my hard drive, and there may be no connection at all, but who knows what can happen if a software corrupts. It will forever remain a mystery and I've no worries about that as it was soon fixed.
Mind you I'm puzzled as to why I still couldn't boot after restoring the partitions with MiniTools, because after booting again with the rescue CD, Minitools showed that the three partitions were indeed restored.
I do have backups of all my drives bootsectors, but Macrium was a safe bet to restore the Master Boot Record with the correct partition information, so that's the way I went.
Some years ago I believe there may have been a conflict between by security/malware protection and the actions of a Partition Manager "tweak".
The result was that my Laptop lost the partition tables - everything was lost.
The ancient version 4.? Minitool Boot Rescue CD quickly located the partition boundaries
and the only partition that proved troublesome was the "Acronis Secure Zone" which I had not used for years,
so I gave up on that and restored the rest of the partitions.
With partitions restored it failed to boot.
I knew that Macrium would fix the problem but chose to gain alternative experiences.
I plugged in the Minitool Boot Recovery CD again and used this to repair the MBR,
and then WIndows was able to boot.
After the excitement I realised that when I used Acronis it provided the "Acronis Secure Zone" as a rudimentary "Recovery" partition,
and that the MBR and been twisted by Acronis to visit their zone during the boot process should the user be hitting a key,
and otherwise it would then got to C:\ and start Windows.
The MBR was trying to start-up via a partition that was no more..
Alan I did almost the exact same thing.
I set Acronis to go straight to its own boot option and made a big secure zone to save backup files.
Had some boot failure issues, and the secure zone takes up too much space anyway.
Too clumsy, too many changes, too much trouble, not really necessary. Didn't know that then.
Soon I am going to reinstall win xp and Acronis (TI ver. 11 still works well on xp).
After 12 years I have finally figured out what softwares I need for xp and when those are in and xp is updated I intend to "freeze" it.
I'll store the Acronis backups on an external USB drive, and use the boot CD to restore from there if need be.
One lives & learns, eh, and storage space has gotten cheaper, so that sounds like a good option, do you think?
Still haven't settled on a backup software for win 7, its between Macrium and Image for Windows, I guess.
With partitions restored it failed to boot.
I knew that Macrium would fix the problem but chose to gain alternative experiences.
I plugged in the Minitool Boot Recovery CD again and used this to repair the MBR,
and then WIndows was able to boot.
I'm pleased you contributed that experience Alan, and I was also tempted to experiment. I thought to use the utility I backed up the MBR with to restore it.
http://www.trojanhunter.com/products/mbr-backup/
I'm pretty sure that would have worked because that utility has a "View Partition Table" option which shows exactly what partition info is stored in the backup, and all three partitions were indeed properly recorded.
As it turned out I went with the sure-fix of the Macrium Image.
All the same it's valuable to know that MiniTools would have fixed it.
i've used Norton Ghost for over a decade.
easy, reliable.
yes, includes boot disc/usb
the latest version is now named: Symantec System Recovery.
looks just like ghost to me.
runs incrementals automatically.
manages backup destination automatically.
backs up to network disks (NAS)
on my 6-mo old toshiba satellite u845t-4155
it's hardly noticeable when running in
background. it does go significantly
faster using Gbps ethernet (rather than
old skool fast enet, 100Mbps)
i haven't used acronis. i have used
have used paragon and ms DISM.
prefer ghost.
also allows mounting a recovery image as if it were a disk. very useful.
have fun!
Thanks, adam.