Windows 7 forum: Windows 7 won't boot on new hard drive

I think my system partition and/or boot files were not on the logical D: drive which I took a backup of. And that is what I think is my problem. I dont think the backup is flawed. I did not get any errors when I backed up my D: drive and also did not get any errors when I used this back up to restore it onto C: drive.

Okay, how about if I do the following,

What if I format my primary partition C: with /S i.e. make it a system bootable partition, and then restore it with my backup? Will the restore wipe out the system information?

I will also look into EasyBcd to see if that can help fix my problem.

With how BCD works I have yet to see the old Format /s to restore that boot. Are you using your DOS days to figure this out?
Bob

I am off the wall here completely... You are right. Can't try those DOS commands to fix my problem.

I did some further reading and here is what I understand....

1. Win 7 64 bit has to be on an Extended partition, so what that means is I need to create an Extended partition and restore my D: drive backup onto it.

2. I need to create another primary system partition which will have the system/bootloader files on it.

Now, I can do # 1 above and can also do part of #2 i.e. create a primary partition, but how do I make it system partition with boot files on it so that it boots my Win 7 64 bit partition.

Please correct me if I am doing anything wrong here.

Thanks in advance....

Oh one more thing.. I forgot to mention...

When I took a back up of my old Windows D: logical drive using paragon HDD software, It actually created two backups.

One contained the backup of First Track.. ( not sure what it is?) Do you know if this contains my system partition files/info?

The second contained the actual Windows backup.

Your issues are now their issues. If they claim this will restore a working system, they need to fix that.

The BCD, boot area does not appear to fit in the first track. I can see why someone would do that but the backup system looks flawed to me and I've supplied what I would try if there was any reason to try to recover this.

However there is no good reason so far. That is, the restore should let us get at any files we forgot to backup and then we could start over with a good OS install and make new plans for backups.
Bob

Thanks for the prompt reply.

If I go with the new OS install, I will have to re-install all the software and what about all my data files? Not sure if I want to loose all that, however, if all fails, it is the last resort I have....

I know my Paragon backups have restored a working system in the past. I tried it couple of times in the past when I had a bad virus on my system, and it completely restored, but then I was on XP 32 bit, and everything was on one primary partition C: drive. I did not have any other partitions.

That leads me to believe that I have a good backup of my Windows7 OS/Software Apps, and data, but do not have the system partition backup with booting info, that is what I think I need to create. Not sure how to?

As for the First Track backup that Paragon created, it seems to me that it contains partition table info for the entire drive. When I try to restore it, it wont let me select a partition to restore to rather it selects the entire drive to restore to....

So,

Lets say, Assuming my Windows OS backup is good but missing the system partition backup, Is there a way to create system partition with boot info?

That's for Paragon to answer why it didn't work.

I offered what I would try but you've proven the system is not working. And since it's Paragon, it's their problem now.
Bob