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Help! Recovering Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop (Vista + Win 7 upgrade) after drop...

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  • 12-04-2010 12:11pm
    #1
    Inspector Gadget
    Registered Users Posts: 1,393 ✭✭✭


    Hi folks:

    I've been handed an Inspiron 1525 laptop, which originally shipped with Vista, but the owner of it (a friend of mine) bought a downloaded (as far as I know) upgrade copy of Windows 7 to put on it. No idea which exact version of each is installed.

    The problem is, he dropped the thing while it was running, had (what seems to be) a head crash, and has ended up with 22 damaged sectors on the drive, all on the OS partition - the Mediadirect, Diagnostics and Recovery partitions are apparently unharmed. The thing looks like it's trying to boot, but sits there with a blank screen and a very lonely looking mouse cursor (I've waited half an hour to verify that it goes no further).

    So, I decided I'd get another drive, clone the contents of the drive (errors and all), and then try to recover Vista off the recovery partition and afterwards figure out where the hell the Windows 7 updater is and run that. However, having cloned the disk (I used Acronis True Image to do an "automatic" disk clone) it chokes at the boot manager with an error 0xc0000225, stating "The boot selection failed because a required device is in accessible". Now, here's the thing, and it's probably important - the original disk was a 250GB (Hitachi), and the replacement disk is a 500GB (WD), so partitions were resized in the process (True Image's automatic disk clone proportionally scales all partitions, so the sizes of each partition were roughly doubled during the clone).

    I've very little experience of meddling with Vista, and none whatsoever with Windows 7, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

    Cheers,
    Gadget.


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    #2
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 90,843 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    I prefer to use ddrescue to read data from a damaged drive as it won't bomb out on a bad sector and will retry later on


    But if the original drive won't boot because of a problem on the boot sector then the clone won't either.

    If it was XP I'd be saying fixboot / fixmbr and stuff, but first step is to make sure the partition on the new drive is set to be bootable ;)


    If all else fails then you could do an upgrade install of 7 to inherit the current settings, if that fails then blame corruption of the registry/settings files which it likely is (someone may have more recovery info for 7 )
    and then you are looking at a clean install


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    #3
    Inspector Gadget
    Registered Users Posts: 1,393 ✭✭✭Inspector Gadget


    Hey:

    The original disk will boot fine. How and ever, the clone won't. The original one gets as far as displaying the Windows logo animation, and then after that fades to black, shows the mouse pointer, and stalls. The imager I used did warn me about the bad sectors, but I was able to tell it to ignore them and carry on.

    The partition was set to be bootable by the clone operation (yes, I did check :) ) - no joy. Tried setting the Recovery partition to be active only to be greeted by "BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Gah.

    [edit]Found this though, which may be relevant (see the second last post from oxyo): http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=42099 [/edit]

    I'm curious about this downloadable upgrade procedure too - I assume it's not an ISO, as explaining to people how to use one of those would be too complex for many users? Instead, I'm guessing it's an executable "installer" of some sort, but I have no idea what I'm looking for, what it's called or how big it should be (even roughly).

    Cheers,
    Gadget


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