Hi everyone,

I have a custom Linux machine that is basically a karaoke machine, and I wanted to clone the 2tb hard disk for backup purposes.

I did this in Windows 8. Upon installing the disk, it detected as an ntfs drive and automounted it as F drive. I used Macrium Reflect to clone the disk and it was successful - however when I tried both the clone and the original in the karaoke machine, both won't boot.

The drives are detected though because the system hangs at the loading screen, and when I try running the machine without any disk, it comes up with a boot error white screen with blue text and a countdown, after which it auto reboots and does the same thing in a loop.

Basically, I think I screwed the original Linux disk by cloning it in Windows...either Windows has written to the MBR or its to do with Windows writing a recycle bin or system volume info (which I don't think it did since the last file change date was 2012).

Does anyone know what might be the problem here, and how best to recover from it? Is there anything I can do to rebuild the hard disk (perhaps under ubuntu) and then manually transfer the files across?

Many thanks

I can understand the clone being screwed. Macrium Reflect is described as "Disk image, file backup and disk cloning for Windows" and probably would not understand a Linux file system.
I am not so sure as to what happened with the original, although this bothers me.
Perhaps the partition type was changed from a Linux file system type to an NTFS file system type in the partition table.

I think testdisk is worth a try. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk