Hello,

I have an older dual boot 2K / XP dual hard drive system that I use as an emergency backup. It also has hardware peripherals that are no longer supported on newer PCs. The existing drives were starting to grow SMART errors so I decided to replace the drives with some newer ones. The old ones were 120Gb and the new ones 320Gb.

I used Paragon to backup the old drives on a different machine and then restore them to the new drives on the same machine and then transfer the drives to the old PC. Since the new drives were larger I increased partition sizes on the new drives so ended restoring each partition individually and not the entire drive at once. The XP drive will boot fine. However, the 2K drive will start to boot but always BSOD with a Stop 0x7b.

The good news to this saga is that I still have the original 2K drive and it boots just fine when installed in the old PC. This immediately rules out any PC hardware issues. While swapping drives I noticed something odd on the Boot.ini / bootloader screen. On the new restored 2K drive the boot screen only shows option lines for XP or 2K. When I put the original properly functioning drive back in I also see additional option lines for:

Microsoft Windows Recovery Console
do not select this [debugger enabled]

So apparently something significant has changed in the backup/restore process that is preventing booting. Do any of you have a any ideas as to what is going on to cause this or better yet how to further diagnose and fix this issue?

Thanks,
Steve