Master Boot Record & image restore issues

[Nolonemo]

I posted this on the Acronis forums (I use Acronis True Image for backups), but thought someone here might have some insight.
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I'm in MBR issues land because of an accident while resizing partions:

I have a dual boot system: Win98 on the active primary partition, WinXP on the D: drive, the first drive in the extended partition, then a partition for apps and a partition for data. The dual boot was set up without a third party boot manager, by first installing Win98 to the C: drive and then XP to the D: drive per Microsoft's guidelines. Works fine (on boot I get a menu asking which OS to boot)

I needed to resize partitions because I was running out of space on the C: drive. So, using Partion Magic, I set up a resize of C: by taking a little space from D:. During the resizing operation, there was a loss of power to the computer, resulting in a corrupt D: partition (which was being resized during the power loss).

Having learned from painful experience in the past, I had imaged the C: and D: partitions before beginning the resizing. But I didn't image the entire physical drive, I imaged the C: D: and E: partitions individually.

After the failure, since the D: partition was now corrupt, I went ahead and resized C: and D:, and then restored the images I had made earlier.

Result: computer wouldn't boot, all I got was a flashing cursor after the normal Bios flash screen.

After a little reading around, I thought I had a toasted MBR, so I tried the MBR recover utility posted here. Didn't change things. So now I'm planning to do a basic reinstall of Win98 and WinXP to set up the MBR for dual boot and then restore the C: & D: & E: images, so I'll be back to the way I was.

My questions are, though:

(1) if the size of the partitions I'm reinstalling the OS's in is different from the size of the original partitons I imaged and will restore, will I have the same problem of not being able to boot?

(2) or can I just fdisk the whole drive as unpartitioned and let True Image create the partitions when I restore (will True Image do that on separate partition restores, or only on a drive image restore?) Or would that be futile since (as I understand it) True Image only images the MBR when you image the whole physical drive?

Any guidance would be much appreciated, before I waste more time trying stuff that doesn't work.-

Many thanks for any help.

[krosenstein]

1. I believe True Image will restore a bit-for-bit image of the backed up partition. I don't know what will happen if the size of the source partition is different than the size of the destination partition. It seems like Acronis would best be able to answer that.

2. It doesn't sound like that will work for the reason you state.

Not very helpful, but it's all I've got.

[d lehmann]

Trueimage only does the mbr on the whole drive.
What has worked for me in the past is to reimage and then for xp you can do a repair install if you want to keep desktop, progs etc. I use acronis partition expert to resize after the reimage.
As for win98, I can't remember, but I faintly recall a repair install for it too.
I had never done them in a dual boot situation.

[Nolonemo]

I did reimage and try an xp repair install, but that didn't solve the problem. It might be that what I needed to do was first do the Win98 repair install (which I think is just a reinstall, but it retains your settings by default) and then the xp repair.

[egibbs]

I have been pleasantly surprised in the past to find that scandisk /r actually CAN fix even badly broken disks.

I've had partitioning failures and tried everything else to no avail, then as a last resort run scandisk (from the recovery console). Lo and behold, a couple hours later (it takes a LONG time) the system was bootable.

Probably worth a try before you do anything more drastic.

Ed Gibbs

[Nolonemo]

Thanks for the tip, Ed, I'll bear it in mind for the next time.

Actually, it turned out I had imaged the entire drive (which therefore included the MBR) immediately after the dual OS install + drivers + TrueImage. I didn't notice that image file for a couple of days because I departed from my ususal naming scheme, so it wasn't next to the more recent partition images.

Anyway, after a restore of the initial install full drive image, both OS boot fine, now all I have to do is to restore the most recent partition images and I'll be back up and running.

I can't believe the astounding amount of time I have wasted on this simply because I forgot that I had done what is my standard practice on building any machine!

Thanks to all who responded.