First post, by maximus
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Hi, all. Been using Clonezilla to save and restore disk images for years. Has saved me tons of time over manual Windows 98 and Windows XP installs.
Recently I installed Windows XP SP3 on the following hardware (everything known good and working fine):
Compaq Presario SR1215CB
Sempron 3000+
1 GB DDR
60 GB HDD
Decided to create a new disk image before installing drivers and whatnot. Used the "savedisk" option with default settings as usual, and everything seemed to work fine (saved image checked OK). I did, however, use a newer version of Clonezilla that I had not tested before: clonezilla-live-20200302-eoan-amd64. This appears to have been a mistake.
Today I tried to restore that image and now the system will not boot. After POST it displays the following message:
Error loading operating system
Lovely 😒
Here's what I've tried so far:
1) Booted a Linux live CD and checked the hard drive. GParted showed a single NTFS partition with the boot flag set, which is what I expected.
2) Booted from the Windows XP installation CD, started the recovery console, and ran the following commands:
fixmbr
fixboot
No change. The output from fixmbr did report that the MBR was borked, but apparently it did not fix it.
3) Tried restoring the image again with a slightly newer version of Clonezilla (clonezilla-live-20200428-focal-amd64). Clonezilla reported that the image was successfully restored, but it still won't boot.
Not really in the mood for another manual Windows XP install, so I figured I'd ask around here first. Anyone else run into this issue before?