Windows 7 Booting from restored system image fails

[Adam Lawrence]

My Win7 HP x64 PC has two hard drives, each partitioned into two volumes:

My C:\ and E:\ drives are each half of a 200GB drive, both NTFS.
My D:\ and F:\ drives are each half of a newer, 1TB drive, both NTFS.

My F:\ drive has around 400GB of 'stuff' that I want to preserve.

I've been trying to migrate the win7 installation from C:\ to the first partition of the 1TB drive with two different tools (Norton Ghost and the built-in Windows backup utility) and both fail identically.

The backup procedure itself appears to work in both cases.

Restoring the backup to the first partition of the 1TB drive "works" in so much as I don't get any errors either way.

Creating the requisite boot structures also work, as the O/S appears to be bootable.

However, when the restored O/S makes it to the login screen, two flaws are evident:

1. The keyboard absolutely does not work.
2. If I log in on an account that doesn't need a keyboard (no password), I see "Loading desktop", then a few seconds "Logging out" and I'm back at the login screen.

If I look at the event viewer logs (booting up with the O/S on the smaller drive), I see numerous events like this:

"The AVGIDSAgent service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the file specified."

"The Windows Live ID Sign-in Assistant service failed to start due to the following error:
The system cannot find the file specified."

"The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{8BC3F05E-D86B-11D0-A075-00C04FB68820}
and APPID
{8BC3F05E-D86B-11D0-A075-00C04FB68820}
to the user Guruzone64\Guest SID (S-1-5-21-3311641231-759685909-3318369334-501) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool."

Is this something to do with the partition sizes being different, or am I doing something horribly wrong?

I'm starting to think that I'll have no choice but to rebuild the O/S from scratch on the new drive.

 

[Saltgrass]

The symptoms you seem to be showing are likely related to an OS that is not correctly activated, or has expired, which would indicate to me the OS transfer has not been done correctly.

If I were you, I would make an image of the Win 7 partition for the original drive. You would usually do this on an external drive. Then move the data from the 400G partition to the external drive so it will not be overwritten when the image is restored to the larger drive.

Then replace the original with the larger drive and restore the image to it. I suggest disconnecting the original drive since it can be confusing as to which drive you are actually working on. This will, of course wipe out the data on the 400 G partition, so you will need to move it prior. Once the image is restored, you can adjust the size of the partitions on the new drive using Disk Management. Once you get everything where you want it, reconnect the older drive and make sure it is set to secondary in the bios, which should be done automatically during the process.

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