Windows 7: new hard drive won't boot

Okay I got a new hard drive and ran the backups from acronis to replace my main drive. But when I booted up it said it couldn't and to run repair which I did but that came back as not being able to repair automatically. Did I do something wrong or did I get a bad drive. I put my old drive in and it booted fine. Below is a pic of the error I got with the new hard drive.

I'd temporarily just plan to use the new drive as a data drive rather than a boot drive--for as long as it took me to verify that the new drive is not defective.

Did the new drive seem to format OK? Had you used it at all before trying to restore an Acronis image to it?


Run the manufacturer's disk utility on the new drive. Or run chkdsk /r from a command prompt. Or both.

If you can verify that the new drive is not defective, then worry about Acronis. It may well be an Acronis or imaging issue.

I was thinking I should have just installed windows on the bare disk and then run the acronis recovery, does that sound right? I never did a new hard drive myself before, I always got the parts and took it to the pc shop but I really don't have the extra money to do that right now. I removed the new disk and put the old one back. I can try tomorrow. Oh was I supposed to format it? I used the add new disk from acronis, see attachment

I no longer use Acronis for fear of issues such as this, but I seriously doubt you have to first install Windows to a new drive before using Acronis.

I wouldn't expect Acronis to restore to a defective drive. Nor would I necessarily expect Acronis to restore to a good drive. Image restoration isn't a flawless process--as you may be finding out.

As stated in previous post---confirm to your satisfaction that the drive is not defective. Format it and run some disk checking utilities on it. Put some data on it for a few days to give you some idea that it isn't broken.

yeah I'll try that tomorrow.

Every hard disk will have a unique identifier and a restored OS from a backup of another disk may not work correctly, with the latest windows and the activation technologies.

You can first try to install the OS on the new HDD and once the OS is up and running and activated, and all other applications installed, you may restore all the other files from your old hard disk (better copy normally from old HDD rather than restoring a backup).

A backup image will generally include the unique disk ID, so that'll be restored along with it (it's part of the MBR). So I don't think that's the issue.

However, I suspect the original drive from which you made your Windows image also has a 100MB system partition containing the boot files. Did you back up that system partition as well? If not, then the restored system can't boot from the new drive because the boot manager and all boot entries are missing completely.

Installing a fresh copy of Windows followed by restoring your image to the new Windows partition (overwriting it) may well solve the issue; it's worth a try. You might need to run startup repair again after this, but should have a much better chance at getting it going.

okay here's what I did and didn't work. I formatted the new drive and did a clean install of win 7, everything booted fine and dandy. Did my recovery backup and got the same error and the repair can't be done automatically. I took some snaps of the detailed report, I may have to put some in another post here. Anyway, I don't want to have to take it to the pc shop, I really can't afford the extra money right now to get it fixed, before they used to use my backups for new drives and they had no problem with booting.

Just a thought, if you were going to restore an image, you need to have a formated drive because that's how the working image was attained. Personally i would do a clean install on the new drive that way everything is fresh and new and you don't carry over any corruption. After that's done put your old drive back in transfer any pictures, music, files you need, then format the old drive and use it for storage and backup. Just my 2 cents