Wednesday 19 February 2014

Acronis Disk Director 11 Home messes up Windows 8.1 Big time , unable to Boot.

PC would not Boot Up.
The only thing that worked was good old fashioned DOS.

I have been trying to use Acronis Disk Director or rather the application within it called OSS (Operating System Selector) to start up either Windows 7 Pro or Windows 8.1 which are on 2 different SATA Hard Drives.
All seemed to be well at first but I noticed that Windows Updates which needed to reboot were taking ages to shut down.

Eventually I got the dreaded message
"Starting Acronis Loader....
No configuration file present.
Press Enter to reboot"

I have just found this from Acronis Support as Feb 2014

Acronis loader error message

The current release version of DD (11) is not certified to support windows 8. While some of it's underlying architecture may work with the current release of DD, compatibility cannot be guaranteed.


You can say that again.
No attempt using the Acronis Bootable Media would repair the OSS.
Even the option to restore from an Acronis Backup using TrueImage 2013 failed.



Most likely, Acronis Startup Recovery Manager was activated somehow and now it doesn;t work correctly. To resolve the issue, you need to fix MBR (Master Boot Record). Please do the following:

Insert your Windows 7 DVD in to a DVD drive and restart your PC to boot from this device (you may be prompted to "press any key" to boot from a CD/DVD drive). If you have a recovery partition instead of the installation CD, choose this during the advanced BIOS options stage (on Dell PCs this often accessed by CTRL+F11).

After a little wait for loading, you will be presented with the Windows 7 installation screen. Select your language and keyboard input method and then click OK to continue.

Then select Repair your computer from the bottom right hand corner (not the install now button). Clicking this will search for installed versions of Windows 7 on your computer which you can then attempt to repair.

Once the scanning has finished, you will be prompted to select your Windows 7 install drive. Usually there is only 1 option. Click this and then the Next button.

A list of recovery options will then appear, from which you should click Startup Repair. Windows 7 will then scan your computer for any potential problems. If any problems are found, you will be prompted to select the appropriate course of action. Please select an option to repair your boot configuration, reboot and the issue shouldn't occur anymore.

None of the above worked but the Windows 7 and Windows 8 DVD did give me access to a cmd prompt that actually would access commands/
 

To effect a repair at the >cmd prompt, enter:

BootRec.exe /fixmbr
press Enter
If successful a message will report.

you can also substitue the /fixmbr with thes commands:

/FixBoot. Writes a boot sector onto the system partition to start Windows

/ScanOs. Scans all disks for Windows installations and displays them to you.

/RebuildBcd. Scans all disks for Windows installations and prompts you to pick the ones you want to add to the BCD.(Boot configuration data or Boot selector)

Information

Also checkout the Seven Forums Tutorials:- MBR - Restore Windows 7 Master Boot Record Bootmgr is missing - Fix


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