Hello,

I made an image of my main drive 640GB drive that has XP, Win 7 and Ubuntu on it. Yes Acronis does support ext2/3/4.

The images were installed, as a test, onto a smaller 240 GB HD that was all unallocated space.

NB: Note that the Grub bootloader on the main drive is NOT in charge of the MBR of Windows 7, I can boot to each one separately. Grub controls only Linux and the MBR boots only Win 7 and XP.

When I rebooted the drive to see how the restore went, I was presented with the Grub bootloader screen, NOT the Boot Manager Screen that shows me XP, 7 & Linux.

Grub allowed me to boot to Ubuntu and it worked fine.

I restarted and this time I chose Win 7 from Grub, since it showed it on /dev/sda2. After I made that choice I got the black "Boot Manager Screen" that showed XP 7 & Linux/Ubuntu

So I chose XP, and nothing happened. So I chose 7 to try that. After a looooong delay it booted and worked fine. Looking at the directories in 7 I can see that all of XP is there and it's there in the Disc Management of 7 as well as all the other partitions

So the question is how did lose the ability to boot XP from the Boot Manager?

Prior to doing all this I have had many attempts to image Linux and they all failed.

I had a feeling that if I was to image all 3 partitions and restore all 3, then my Linux install would boot and run, and it did. But I never thought I'd lose XP in the process and I'm not sure why.

The way it is normally on the main drive, XP was installed first, then 7 then Linux. The 7 boot info was written into XP and I have EasyBCD in XP to show the MBR where to find Grub so I can boot to Linux.

The following day I tried to boot the machine and got the message BOOT MGR IS MISSING hit CTrl +Alt Del to restart. I ended up using the Win 7 install disk to repair the boot manager in Win 7 now it seems that's the only OS I have. It makes no sense at all to me, a bit difficult for me to understand how an OS can disappear overnight! <sigh>

Thanks to all in advance

I'm not sure whether this partition is corrupted. The windows only sees himself. The windows are sometimes made ​​an indelible mark on the MBR. Most work in the case when at least four partitions are doing. First the windows. Second ubuntu ext4 or another. Third swaps. Fourth home. The ext2 partticiót little more disks (floppy) should be used. Both recommended operating system partition formatted trip or tread. Grub to the MBR.

That makes no sense. You said on the original system you use windows to boot with EasyBCD so that would put windows boot code in the master boot record, not Linux Grub. So either you did something wrong or the Acronis software didn't do what you wanted.

Grub doesn't boot windows, xp, vista, 7 or whatever. It chainloads which means it points to the partition IPL where the windows boot code is. In your instance, windows 7 would have put its code in the xp if xp was installed first and was on a primary partition and you could then boot either 7 or xp from windows. I don't know what went wrong here but if you can boot windows 7 you need to look there to see what happened with your xp. You might be better off at a windows forum since this is unrelated to Grub, if as you say you originally had windows code in the mbr using EasyBCD.

Yancek,

I agree with all of what you say. This has been an ongoing problem, trying to find a reliable way to make images of both MS and Linux files and have them work when re-installed.

It was suggested that I try a program called "Redo" that looked very promising except it wouldn't allow an image to be placed on a smaller HD than originally was used to make the image.

For me at this juncture I'll only use Acronis to back up Windows and if Grub or Ubuntu has a problem I'll just re-install it all over again. Not saving a lot of time doing it that way for sure but it's the only way I have to keep things working in a pinch. Since I have no important files on Ubuntu I won't be losing anything except time, I am still learning to use it effectively for some of my Windoze things.

A good friend and I have been experimenting making backups using Acronis, and for all intents and purposes it only seems reliable backing up Windows OS's, even though it's listed as supporting ext2/3/4. It will copy the files to another location, but once there the system remains broken, yielding a Grub Rescue error. I can fix that with the Boot Rescue Disc but that puts Grub everywhere,. Does it work then? Yes, but is it the way I had it or want it? "no"

Regards tnx for your time!

For what it's worth I've discovered that if I put ONLY Win 7 and Ubuntu on a spare HD I can sucessfully image them and restore them to an unallocated partition. The problem is somehow related to the EasyBCD setup that is in XP. Since I don't intend keeping XP it's no loss, but it does prove that an image can be made and a 'bare metal restore' can be done using Acronis, of both Ubuntu and Win 7.

Yancek, I think your assessment is correct, something is wrong with the EasyBCD config in XP.

Regards