I'm Mad About Technology..

I was working on a machine a few weeks back that suffered a hardware failure – I ended up having to rebuild all the components I could save into a new box – and it got me thinking that this would be a real good time to practice-what-you-preach, and do a backup.

Two birds with one stone and all that, I thought this might be the right time to do an upgrade on the boot drive too.

In my setup right now is a 32Gb SLC Intel SSD and I’m upgrading to a 64Gb Patriot drive, both have roughly the the same 250MB/sec throughput, but the inferno is larger in size. Windows 7 used only a fraction of the original 32 gig, but the patriot supports trim and I can move the static page file onto it too.

So I get Norton Symantec Ghost 15 up and running, set about making an clone of my Win 7 boot drive, turn off the PC when it’s done and exchange the Intel for the Patriot on the original SATA cable.

I turn on the computer, and it doesn’t boot. I take the case apart again, checking I didn’t accidentally cause a disconnect when I put the case back together, I checked the boot order in BIOS, nothing wrong. Maybe it’s faulty? I put the original drive back in, and it doesn’t boot.

Norton Fucking  Ghost

So I do a search on the internet through my Android phone and it’s apparent this is a known bug.

Source and destination drives do not start after I perform Copy My Hard Drive operation in Norton Ghost 15.0 on Windows 7 or Vista

https://www-secure.symantec.com/norton-support/1.6/jsp/help-solutions.jsp?docid=kb20100119144100EN_EndUserProfile_en_us

It destroys the Boot Configuration Data, or BCD, that Windows needs to locate and boot the OS. The solution? Boot off your Windows installation disk and do a repair. Or DOS.

Ghost SRD

I was able to boot off the Ghost 15 System Recovery Disk, and get the BCD re-built using the following DOS commands.

To create a new bootloader, type the following commands one at a time.
Press Enter after you type each line:

del c:\boot\bcd
bcdedit /createstore c:\boot\bcd.temp
bcdedit /store c:\boot\bcd.temp /create {bootmgr} /d "Windows Boot Manager"
bcdedit /import c:\boot\bcd.temp
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:
bcdedit /timeout 10
del c:\boot\bcd.temp

That completes the steps required to rebuild the bootloader, and now we need to add our OS to it.

bcdedit /create /d "Windows 7" /application osloader

bcdedit should return a message with a unique GUID for the newly-created entry, something like this,

The entry {c0dfc4fa-cb21-11dc-81bf-005056c00008} was successfully created.

You’ll need to use the UNIQUE value that bcdedit returned for you below, instead of {your-guid}, along with the drive letter for the drive that Windows is installed on.

bcdedit /set {your-guid} device partition=C:
bcdedit /set {your-guid} osdevice partition=C:
bcdedit /set {your-guid} path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
bcdedit /set {your-guid} systemroot \Windows

And, last of all, tell the Windows bootloader to boot the new entry by default:

bcdedit /displayorder {your-guid}
bcdedit /default {your-guid}

Now the BCD has been completely rebuilt from scratch. Some of the details included here taken from Symantec and also NeoSmart. The NeoSmart article gives you more options and screen shots, including details on the repair of the bootloader using the Windows installation disk and how to attempt automatic repair with /rebuildbcd.