Invalid system disk?

[tonyd]

I'm upgrading the hard drive in a Compaq 1247 laptop. The original disk had 2 partitions, one for booting and use; the other is labeled Save. I think that's a restore disk of some kind.

I removed the original 4 GB drive and made an Acronis True Image of it. I then restored the image to a 6 BG drive that I had laying around. Put it in the laptop and it boots just fine.

Then I wanted to increase the size of the boot partition. Using Acronis Disk Director, I increased the size of the boot partition by using unallocated space and some free space that was in the second partition.

Now the laptop won't boot - I get Invalid system disk - replace the disk and hit any key to continue. I've done this twice so far.

Has anyone run across this before or have any idea what's going on here?

[mylanta]

Maybe you accidentally overwrote the mbr? Boot to recovery console and try fixboot and fixmbr are possibilities.

[tonyd]

Acronis got back to me this morning:

If you restore an image archive of the entire hard disk including the master boot record (MBR), then you cannot resize the partitions. There are two possible workarounds, if you need to restore the partitions with resizing while the MBR is also restored.

- Restore the entire hard disk without resizing and then restore each of the partitions separately setting the proper size for it and overwriting the previously restored one.

- Restore the partitions separately resizing them and then fix the MBR manually by one of the below ways:

1) Boot the computer from Windows 95/98/ME Startup Disk and run "fdisk /mbr" command;
2) Boot the computer from Windows 2000/XP Installation CD and run "fixmbr" command in Recovery Console.

- td