Macrium Reflect 7 Free on WinXP - Multiple Broken Macrium Recovery Boot Menu Entries

I had a failing HDD on an old WinXP Pro SP2 machine I had recently upgraded to SP3, and used Macrium Reflect 7 Free (plus SpinRite 6 and Beyond Compare) to salvage the OS and data and clone/copy them onto a new 2TB HDD. Multiple steps later (see below), every time I try to add the Macrium Recovery option to the boot menu, I lose the ability to boot into Windows XP (\ntldr missing or corrupt) and I get another nonfunctioning Macrium Recovery option added to the boot menu (required device is inaccessible). Same error code for both, 0xc000000e.

I do have one functioning Macrium Recovery option on the menu, so every time this happens I can go into it, run bootfix, and reboot - whereupon I can again boot into Windows XP on the new disk, but no longer have a boot menu at all. The next time I try again to add the recovery option, I have one more nonfunctional Macrium Recovery option added to the list - I'm up to 4 nonfunctioning ones and one functioning one, now, in addition to the nonfunctioning entry for Windows XP.

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I suspect the problem has something to do with the copy of Macrium Reflect that was installed on the old HDD, which is still present (I keep finding files on the old disk that somehow didn't make it onto the new one, so I'm keeping the old disk around until I'm sure I have everything I need off of it). After cloning/copying to the new disk, I switched the SATA cables back and forth on the motherboard a couple of times, as I re-lettered the partitions and gave the ones on the old disk new volume names so I wouldn't get them confused, added a new logical drive on the new disk using AOEMI Partition Assistant, and converted the new C: partition from FAT32 to NTFS (with a contiguous MFT) so that I could create a Macrium Rescue disk. This is a Dell PC and didn't come with Windows installation disks, so I've been using the recommended WinPE 3.1 for my Macrium rescue media. I also think I successfully added the Macrium Recovery option to the boot menu, and I'm not sure which disk I was booted from when I did so, but I think probably I was booted from the old disk when I did.

My first indication that something was not right was after I successfully booted to the new disk after converting C: to NTFS, and tried to create a backup image of it. It persistently hung trying to take a VSS snapshot. When looking into that, I discovered one of the Macrium driver files (I think it was wimmount.sys) was missing on the new disk. Copying it over manually didn't help, and neither did running a repair installation, so I uninstalled the trial edition from the new disk and installed the free edition again from scratch. Now I was able to successfully image the disk, at least. However, I wasn't seeing my boot menu when I rebooted the computer. That's when I launched into trying to create it again, and started getting duplicate entries on the boot menu, with only one of them actually working.

I've been at this for a while, now, and I'm getting frustrated. I don't know where to look for the configuration files that actually put the entries onto the boot menu. They have to be Macrium files rather than Windows files, because boot.ini still shows what was put there by fixboot. ntldr and ntdetect.com and boot.ini are all present on both the new and old disks (C: drive and what is now the P: drive), so I'm not sure where the boot manager is looking for those. There is a bootmgr file on the new C:, but none on the old boot partition (now P: ).

Anyone knowledgeable in WinXP and Macrium Reflect have any suggestions? I'd like to end up with a boot menu that includes one entry for Windows XP on my new HDD, and ONE entry for Macrium Recovery. And obviously I'd like them all to be completely independent of the old, bad, HDD so I can eventually remove it.

Thanks,

Rebeccah

Addendum: I just noticed last night that the drive letters on the new disk are messed up, perhaps as a result of running fixboot. C: drive (system, NTFS) and F: drive (data, FAT32) are OK, but a small NTFS partition got re-lettered E: (was G: ) and the new NTFS partition for storing backups from one of my other computers got relettered G: (was J: ), which would of course screw up those backups.

 

Resolved. Eventually, I figured out that what Macrium is doing is adding another boot loader, bootmgr, and a BCD store. Probably because there are two copies of ntldr on my computer (one on C: on the new disk and one on P:, which was C: on the old disk), Macrium or bcdedit wasn't able to set a device for Windows XP in the BCD, so that entry in the boot menu didn't work. Every time I ran bootfix to get back my ability to boot to XP, it removed the BCD information from the registry and switched to booting using boot.ini, but it never removed the names for the deleted entries from the bootmgr boot menu.

I ended up downloading EasyBCD Free, which easily let me see and remove the empty boot menu items, and by entering C: as the device for the Legacy boot manager, I was able to get that entry to launch ntldr, which launches Windows XP.

Moderators, if you see this before approving my original post, I'm OK with you deleting the whole thing -- I cross-posted this lengthy question here and on bleepingcomputer.com. The original is on SuperUser.