Trying to restore crashed hard drive

[jmt356]

I got my laptop back from repair today. I think they replaced my previous hard drive, which crashed. I installed Acronis on it and tried to restore my latest incremental disk backup. Two minutes into the operation, the screen was blank, but on (not pitch black, but black with light still coming through) and the fan was puffing full steam. Around five or ten mintues into this, I assumed the laptop had gotten stuck, so I tried to force it off. I got the message, "Acronis is loading" or something similar, and then the screen turned blue with an Acronis message and an indicator showing the progress of the backup. About a half hour into it, the computer shut down suddenly and completely, with the fan abruptly stopping. I assume something went wrong, maybe because I tried to force it to shut down about a half hour earlier.

I then turned the laptop back up, and it showed a message showing that Windows was starting, and then I got a blank screen with a blinking cursor on the upper left. It didn't progress past that point. I forced shutdown and tried again. Same thing happened.

I then put in the Acronis Rescue disk that I made, and selected the option to do a full Acronis install. About 5 or 10 minutes into it, the screen turned black (not totally shutting off, since light is still emanating from the screen), but the fan is still puffing full steam. I assume the install is stuck again. Should I force shut down?

[StuartR]

If the computer is in the middle of restoring an image backup, and the disk activity light is still flashing, then I think you should wait patiently. Depending on the size of your disk, and the location of your backup file, this can take a VERY long time.

[Bigaldoc]

You can't restore from a backup by installing Acronis on the laptop. You need to boot from the rescue disk and choose to restore a backup. This of course presumes that you have a backup image(s) storage on another disk, USB or a location on a network that the Acronis rescue disk can access.

PS Saying all of the above from "standard" procedural stuff. I use Shadow Protect these day and not Acronis. And it's possible I misunderstand your grammar and you weren't installing Acronis.

[jmt356]

The disk activity light was off when I posted my first message. I just tried to force a shut down because my computer was getting so hot with the fan puffing and all. I got the same message I think I got the first time when I tried a shut down when doing the restore:
"Acronis
"Loading, please wait ..."

Then an Acronis window came up giving me the option to do a restore, which I selected. This time, rather than try to restore the entire Disk 1, which contained the NTFS C drive and HP_Recovery D drive and something called "MBR and Track 0," I selected only the C drive. About 10 minutes into the operation, the computer suddenly and abruptly shut down.




I installed Acronis on the computer and then after installing it, I selected the "Restore" option, which prompted me to indicate that I was to restore to a backup file on an external hard drive and then to reboot. After rebotting, it started the restore.

[jmt356]

I just tried to reboot from the Acronis Rescue Media again. Once again, the screen just turns black and nothing happens. The disk activity light is off. The light on the external hard drive is on but not blinking. I'll wait a little while longer before forcing shut down.

[jmt356]

I was convinced that it was just stuck because the Rescue Media cd wasn't spinning, the disk activity light was off, adn the screen was blank. So I pressed the computer's off button, which again gave me the message,
"Acronis
"Loading, please wait ..."

The Acronis window came back. I am trying another restoration of the C drive.

[jmt356]

It just shut down again in the middle of the restore.

[Doc Watson]

Try restoring the C drive and the MBR (Master Boot Record) file. The system will not start without an intact Master Boot Record on it. If that doesn't do it then try restoring all three choices (although I can't see what restoring the revovery partition would make).

[jmt356]

I sent the computer for repair and they gave it back to me like it was from the factory, without any of my files or installed programs on it. I now want to start again from where I originally began before I started this post several months ago: I want to restore my last image of the hard drive to the laptop. However, I want to be prepared for everything that will go wrong. Please tell me if this is enough and if not, what else I need:

- A Windows Vista recovery disk that I got from http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/windows-v ... -download/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. I'm not sure if this is any good. Last time I tried using this disk was when my computer crashed in November of 2010, after I chose to install Windows, it brought me to a window stating, “The installation was canceled.” Windows cannot open the required file D:\Sources\Install.wim. The file does not exist. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0x80070002." I think this means that the recovery cd did not have enough files on it to enable Windows to be installed.
- Acronis Rescue Media. I made this a year or two ago (not sure when) from the Acronis program itself, which allows me to burn a cd from the Acornis start menu. I'm not sure if this is any good. I'm not even sure if this Media can be used on all laptops running Acronis or if I have to make a special one for every laptop. The problem is, I can't remember whether I made this Rescue Media cd from the laptop that I am about to restore or from another laptop, or if it matters (maybe the Rescue Media is always the same, regardless of which laptop you make it from).
- My Acronis backup and incremental backups before the laptop hard drive crashed in November 2010. I'm not sure if these are any good; they probably have some corruption embedded in the image that will cause my laptop to crash if it is written to the new hard drive. So I will just restore the earliest backup I have saved, since I think the corruption only started in the last versions.
- A brand new image of the laptop hard drive. This was just written today and is based on the laptop after I got it back from the shop, probably after they replaced the previous HD but in any case, while the laptop is working (though this image doesn't have my files on it). I hope that if my computer crashes again like it did in May, I will somehow at least be able to restore to this image.

Please let me know if these files are enough or if there is another way to guarantee that my computer won't become useless again. If this is too risky, I might just manually reinstall each program and restore every file, but I would rather just do it at once through a restore.

[jmt356]

I tried to restore my full image backup in 2 steps: (i) since I suspected there could have been some problem with the Acronis image that caused these problems when I attempted the restore in May of this year, I chose to first run an image verification (I think that is what it was called; it was one of the options in “Set the options manually”) (I think it was called “image verification” and (ii) restore backup.

Because it was more likely that whatever problem was on the hard drive that originally caused the HP Pavilion laptop to crash would have been recorded on a later Acronis incremental backup as opposed to the original full image backup (assuming that it was a software problem), this time (yesterday) I tried restoring the original full image as opposed to the most recent incremental backup, as I did in May. The latter versions are more likely to have problems if they copied any errors in the hard disk that cropped up after the full image was complete.

But after the backup verification was complete, the results were the same as what happened in May: a short while into the operation, the screen was blank, but on (not pitch black, but black with light still coming through) and the fan was blowing. In May, around five or ten mintues into this, I assumed the laptop had gotten stuck and tried to force a shutdown. After an Acronis screen appearing and waiting a half hour, the laptop shut down suddenly.

Yesterday, I didn’t force the shutdown. I allowed the black blank screen to remain with the fan blowing since 12 pm yesterday (21 hours ago). Neither the disk light of the laptop nor that of the external hard drive was blinking. I believe the computer has just been stuck in some intermediate stage, maybe due to an error in the Acronis backup. Nothing has appeared on the screen since yesterday.

Is it safe to force shutdown?

[jmt356]

I just tried to force a shut down, at 9 am my time (21 hours after starting the operation).
The screen turned black with a note stating “Acronis Loading, please wait,” with the white and orange Acronis log in the upper left of the black screen. The screen then turned blue and an Operation Progress window appeared, and the light on the external hard drive but not on the laptop started blinking again. In the Operation Progress window, under both Current operation progress and Total progress, the entire bars were white, presumably meaning that no progress has yet been made.

My guess is that the same thing that happened in my first post 50497 above will happen again: about a half hour into the Operation, the computer will shut down suddenly and completely, with the fan abruptly stopping.

[StuartR]

I think your safest option will be to:

• Put the laptop back into the state it was in when you got it back from the repair people (hopefully you can do this, otherwise you may have to reinstall Windows yourself)
• Make sure everything works properly
• Install Acronis True Image on the laptop
• Mount your old backups using Acronis and copy any data files that you really need to the correct places on the laptop
• Reinstall any other programs that you need from the original CDs or downloads

[jmt356]

As an update, as I predicted, the same thing that happened in my first post 50497: the computer shut during the operation. I came home to find it off with no power running. I tried to turn it on, and got a blank screen with a blinking cursor on the upper left. It didn't progress past that point. I forced shutdown and tried again. Same thing happened.

Stuart, the prospects of getting the computer back to its previous state are slim, given my past lack of success. Your suggestion is good and had I tried to just restore My Documents and other files, it probably would have worked, but I wanted to restore the full image as it would be one step to make my computer look as it did before the first hard drive crash last November.

[DaveA]

Have you checked the power settings on both the CPU and monitor?
As they may be kicking in and powering down.