Problem restoring backup to a new disk

[tmathews]

My laptop's original 20GB disk has gotten a bit full lately so I picked up a new 120GB drive for it. I decided to test my backups by restoring the latest one onto the new disk. The restore seems to go fine but when I install the new disk I get a message about "Unable to boot due to a disk hardware incompatibility" (of course I don't remember the exact wording and don't have the machine with me; I'll update later with the full message if necessary).

The machine is a Dell Inspiron 500m running XP SP2. The original drive is a Hitachi TravelStar 20GB IDE and the new drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.2 120GB IDE (both are jumpered as Master). My backup was created with DriveImageXML. There are no errors during the restore and I marked the partition as Active per DriveImage's instructions. I've tested the new drive using SeaTools and it passes. A repair install of XP on the new drive allowed the machine to boot so despite the message there isn't really a hardware incompatibility. The repair install also wiped out my user accounts so either I did it wrong or I'm not very happy with the result. (I booted the Dell XP reinstallation CD and selected new installation; when it saw the existing Windows image I told it to overwrite the existing \WINDOWS directory. Should I have selected the Repair Console at the first screen?)

Why doesn't this just work? I've thought that maybe the Dell diagnostic partition is necessary but I'm unable to copy it and the repair install allowed me to boot without it. I thought maybe the Seagate drive might need a different driver than the Hitachi so I tried the repair install.

So:
1. Can I not use DriveImageXML for restoring a bootable partition to a new drive?
2. Is there a way to access (or copy or clone) the diagnostic partition short of cloning the whole drive?
3. Am I missing something obvious?

Thanks!

[glc]

I would use good cloning software to clone the diagnostic partition and the rest of the drive in all one shot. Acronis should be able to do this in expert mode. Seagate Disc Wizard *might* be able to do it.

However, the diagnostic partition is really not necessary, you can run diagnostics by booting with a Dell Resource CD.

[tmathews]

Thanks for the suggestion about cloning, but for now I'm more interested in getting my backup procedure to work than I am in getting the existing disk copied to the new one.

My intention was to have a backup procedure in place such that if the existing drive died I could get a new one, restore from backups onto the new drive, pop it in and be up and running again in a few hours. At this point I'm assuming pilot error at some step(s) along the way, but it's also possible DriveImage doesn't do what I want and I should replace it. I'm already considering Acronis as it would save me a slow (but low-effort) encryption/copying step.

Thanks for the confirmation that the diagnostic partition isn't necessary. I still had a small worry that boot was redirected through there and that it had booted after the repair install because it had "fixed" the missing partition. Now it's more a matter of academic curiousity about how to access what's in there, but that can wait until everything else is working.

[glc]

You access the diagnostic partition by pressing F12 at startup.

[tmathews]

After much poking around the tutorials on runtime's website I made the BartPE boot CD with the DriveImageXML plugin, installed the new drive, booted BartPE, and restored that way. And after that it booted right up.

The problem seems to be that in order for the restored image to be bootable it has to be restored with the drive already in place: restoring with the drive in a USB enclosure copies the data but the image isn't bootable. I didn't see anything in the documentation saying this and my initial read of the tutorials just suggested that they were showing you that you could do the restore without the need for a second computer. It's quite possible that I'm missing some easy step to make the restore to USB enclosure work but at least I have a procedure that I know works if I need it.

I'm still curious about copying the diagnostic partition. I know I don't need it but it bugs me that Windows won't so much as let me look at it, let alone copy it. The (little) cloning software I've looked at looks like I clone it if I cloned the whole disk but I'm still looking for something that will let me clone just that partition. I'll start a new thread on that topic if I want to pursue it.

[glc]

Windows won't let you look at it because it's like the old EISA partitions.