cloned drive win 7 wont start without win 7 dvd

I was using windows vista and acronis true image. I did not install secure zone which creates a partition to save backups. All I did was start the pc with the program in the drive. I cloned an older hard drive to Newer hard drive. It is a 3 step process. After step 2 the computer rebooted and the hard drive failed. So I unplugged the destination clone drive (internall) and used my original hard drive to boot into vista. I got various messages with one being ntldr missing and a screen showing linux. It says hit enter to continue. I do that and another message saying missing linux kernal. I know acronis uses linux for booting up frm the bootable disc. I am guessing acronis installed something while doing the clone of hard drive. I am guessing step 3 would have been to remove it. Just guessing. If I use the vista dvd I can do a repair and boot into windows. I always have to do repair or leave win vista dvd in drive. Well I decided to go ahead with win 7 64 bit. My vista was 32bit. I put the dvd in started pc and selected install. I removed the partition and created a new one. After the install was completed I downloaded updates and did a shutdown and restart. Same problem. I now have to use win 7 dvd to either repair or just leave it in the drive. My question is if I deleted and created a new partition why am I still having this problem. How do I fix it? I have been doing some research with boot.ini bottmgr and other things with xp vista and win 7. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you

1. Have you got the right drive selected in your BIOS to be the disc selected for the new cloned drive

I never changed the bios. The bios was set to the original drive and I did not change it.

The program said reboot for operation to complete. I did that and that is when the drive I cloned failed.

So I did the botsectprogram. I still had the same problem. I went into the bios and restored factory defaults and it worked. I never changed the bios. Weird

I've experienced similar problems going from Vista to Win7 and BootSect normally fixes it, but there is also a BIOS setting for Sata Hard Drive set to compatible or AHCI. You may have to toggle to two settings back and forth until the hard drive is recognized.

OBTW you shouldn't get NTLDR missing on a Win 7 drive?? Maybe you used the wrong Bootsect code?? Make sure you used /nt60 for Win7 and not /nt52.

I originally got the message after I used acronis true image to clone the drive running vista. After the drive failed I unplugged it and just used my original drive. When I did a clean install of win 7 I deleted the partition and created a new one. I still would like to know why I was getting that message with only one hard drive active and I deleted and created a new partition. Anyway I am glad it worked.

When you buy a new drive off-the-shelf, the Master Boot Record is more than likely configured as an NTFS drive ready to recieve Windows XP. When you restore an Acronis Image it doesn't overwrite the MBR.

I have a "Maintenance PC" that I use to build HDDs and this is what I have done with new drives:

1. Install as a Slave Drive on Maintenance PC
2. Set Partitions using Acronis Disk Director
(Note: I make all of them Active, and make the Second one Primary)
3. Install in Laptop and Run Windows 7 Recovery CD.
4. Launch Command Prompt and Type BOOTSECT /nt60 c: /mbr
(This prepares the C:\ partition to run Windows 7)
5. Install Windows 7 on C:\ drive.

This should prevent your issue from happeing again.

Dan