Restore wouldn't boot - What did I do wrong?

[bmbguy]

I'm sure this question has been asked before, so I'll apologize in advance for asking it again...

I do regular backups with IFW, but only do rare restores, and had always done the restores (with IFD CD) in the original machines (where the backups were done from), so I've never had this problem until now.

I have a old XP machine with a FAT32 system drive (upgraded from Win ME, two partitions, one active/system, the other an unused 'restore' partition of some sort). Yeah, I know the machine is very old.

At any rate, I was having some issues with the machine, so I wanted to do a restore of the system/boot partition from a backup I'd done with IFW a couple of months ago. Knowing that the machine is old and slow, in order to save time (mistake there!!), I thought I would do the restore of that old XP drive, using IFW, over USB using an enclosure connected to my newer laptop. The restore went quickly, but when I put the drive back in the old XP machine, it wouldn't boot, giving my the dreaded "NTLDR is missing" error.

I spent some time messing with it, trying to correct the error, then thought better of it and tried doing the restore in the original machine using the IFD CD ('automatic' restore option). Yeah, it took a LOT longer (like I said, it's an OLD machine), but the drive did boot fine when all was complete.

So my question is: what did I do wrong when attempting to restore the drive in the USB enclosure via IFW? I assume that there is a way to correctly recreate that system drive/boot device when doing the restore that way, but I assume that I failed to set some restore options properly -- maybe the 'use original geometry', for example? I did get a hint that it might not work correctly when I tried 'automatic', and it gave me some warning about the sizing not being correct...

Understanding that all examples may be different, I'm just curious -- are there some basic 'guidelines' to follow when trying to restore a boot/system partition for one machine using another machine like that?

I would do more experimenting, but I'm not really willing to sit through the 2 1/2 hour restore on the original machine another time if I can't get the other method working...

Thanks for any suggestions you may have.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

Most likely, you would need to either enable the "Assume Same Target System" option in Settings (this is a global geometry option) or use the "Use MBR Geometry" individual override when restoring.

[bmbguy]

Thanks for the quick response Paul.

I had reason to retry the restore via USB -- this time I set the "Assume Same Target System" option and the drive booted in the original system.

As I said, I don't do too many restore operations, so I'm haven't spent too much time exploring all the options. Thanks very much for your suggestions!