I'm replacing a notebook hard drive, from a 60bg sata-2 to a 120gb sata-2. Tried it first with Norton Ghost 9 by making a backup image of the original HD and restoring that to the new drive with primary boot enabled but once the new HD was put in and booted in, it just got to the windows screen and constantly refreshed that, the one with the increasingly annoying sound that plays every time it's loading windows. It wouldn't get any further than that, just constantly refreshing that.

I've tried with the latest version of Norton Ghost - 14, Acronis TrueImage and Paragon Drive Backup but with all of them all I get now is "Invalid LBAI" as soon as it boots up.

I make sure they always have whatever option they use to enable primary booting and with Ghost 14 I had it enabled to restore original disk signature, but all I get when booting is Invalid LBAI.

Whichever program I use now I just get Invalid LBAI when trying to boot up using the new drive. The old drive still boots up ok. Am I missing some obvious setting when making a backup image or when restoring that image to the new drive?

Thanks in advance. Hoping someone out there will know what I'm overlooking!

Forgot to mention, I've checked BIOS and it is recognising the new drive in there.

I tried the same and encountered a different error but very similar situation.

The following worked for me.

I booted off a Windows 98 boot disk. At the dos prompt, I typed in FDISK /MBR

Restarted, everything was fine. Let me know if this worked for you.

If the fdisk /mbr* doesn't work (but it likely will)...

You might also try a freeware Windows program called XXclone. The program has the ability to address the MBR, the boot.ini, etc. even copy the original volume ID. It's easy to use with a clean interface and instructions.

In the few times I've had to use it, it has not failed to produce a fully bootable backup copy of the source drive.

Just don't forget to make active the partition to make sure it's bootable.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/XXCLONE_d5534.html
http://www.xxclone.com/index.htm


*Win98??? Assuming you're dealing with a single-OS booting scenario, then as long as you can get into a situation where you can boot with a recent Windows install/setup disk, and fdisk is available, fdisk /mbr should work. Some of the self-booting freeware repair CD/DVDs even provide this capability. In fact, you can even try cloning a drive using a repair CD/DVD called Knoppix.
http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/
http://www.knoppix.org

Thanks for the replies, and it's sorted now

I'd been doing it the awkward way - old HD put into a USB holder into my desktop with a backup image taken, then the new HD linked into the USB and a restore from the image attempted. As I mentioned before, no matter what program I used it failed to boot properly, regardless of which primary/boot settings I enabled on the restore.

xxclone was actually what got it right. I put the old HD back in the notebook and hooked up the new one through the USB holder, stuck xxclone on the notebook and did a direct clone from there - took an hour or so, switched drives after, all completed without problems and the new hard drive is now definitely set as the master boot drive Now just to go in and assign that extra 60gb of space as a partition after the clone only activated a partition equal to the original size...

Anyway, thanks again. Goes to show that sometimes a no-frills, simple solution is better than something big and flashy. Much appreciated

Glad things are working now. That's great!

By the way, if you just want to grow the size of your primary partition into the unassigned portion of the drive, you can use freeware bootable Partition Logic ver 0.69. It does so while keeping the file-structure of your OS intact. (Although, I do find it helpful to keep partitions to a "reasonable" size to help manage data and backups)
http://partitionlogic.org.uk/about/index.html
(download the .iso, burn to CD, and boot the system from the CD)

Note: it claims it has problems with "some" SATA drives. Don't know if that would apply if you use a USB2SATA adapter...(hmmm. I might try it just as an experiment).

As always, it's a good idea to backup before using any HD tool.


edit to add-(re-edit to add a few more 20091027)
If you need a program to check the MD5 or SHA-1 hash, etc. of a long download (recommended), you can use freeware Fingerprint. Other hash programs can provide more Hash types.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/FingerPrint_d4388.html
http://www.2brightsparks.com/
http://www.karenware.com/powertools/pthasher.asp
http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=10 (note: this is a suite of 5 utilities. GizmoHasher is one of them. You can select to install anywhere from 1 to all 5 of the utilities when the "Gizmo" setup program is run.

Awesome! John thanks for the recommendations, ill be sure to add those to my tools

Thanks for this post, it helped me resolve the same issue with a Dell laptop that I imaged using Bare Medal Recovery.

What did you apply, just out of curiosity