Why is a USB disk corrupted by Vista restore?

Question

I have a laptop with Vista Business on an 80 GB disk. I have created a full backup and stored that on the original 80 GB drive.

On my new 320 GB disk, I have created a partition with exactly the same number of bytes as the original 80 GB disk. I swap the disks so that the 320 GB is internal, and the 80 GB is in a USB caddy. I boot from the NEO restore CD and everything looks fine: I select the dump on the USB drive, target is drive C:, start the restore.

After a few seconds, the restore fails with "not enough disks in machine or disk not large enough" error (I did note the exact phrase).

I then swap the 80 GB disk back to the internal drive, but the thing is unbootable.

Why has the restore process scrubbed the boot status of the USB drive?

Answer 1

The problem was not that my new 320 GB disk could not be built from a Vista restore image (that was another issue that I finally solved using diskpart to set the precise attributes of the new volume). The problem was that the USB disk that was holding the restore image was corrupted by the abortive restore process. I would have expected the restore process to leave the disk containing the restore image unchanged.

I think the restore process got confused over which disk was the destination and which the source.

Answer 2

If you clone a partition rather than a disk, the target partition may not be active and thus unbootable.