Just finished new Vista install on Dell E6500.

Went to upload the image to our server and noticed starting sector was 2048.

Loaded image and then downloaded image to larger drive.

Installed hard drive in laptop and it just keeps rebooting.

My question is can I change the 2048 to 63 without destroying the image???

Thanks for any help.

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Low flying aircraft the sound of freedom.

Have you tried booting to the Vista install cd & running the diagnosics?

Getting ready to now.

Let you know how things turn out.

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Low flying aircraft the sound of freedom.

No change!!!

Is there some BIOS setup that could have caused it to make the starting sector 2048???

Will take the laptop home tonight and try again.

Thanks for the help.

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Low flying aircraft the sound of freedom.

No, it isn't a BIOS setting - the decision about the starting sector number is made by whatever software is creating the partition. Windows Vista (or later) tries to start the first partition at sector 2048, on a blank disk without any existing partitions, for greater compatibility with Advanced Format (i.e. 4kB physical sector) drives, and there are other advantages related to GPT too IIRC. I'm not sure why you want to change the partition starting sector to become 63, as it's not clear to me how your image was made (e.g. including or excluding the original partition table).

I don't do Windows support any more (and it's off-topic here anyway). So although I could make some guesses about how you could proceed, I think you'd be better asking a Windows support forum, where this type of question (and advice) will be much more common & on-topic.

As has been pointed out this is hardly a recovery case which is really what this forum is about. Still to help you along.......

Try booting with a vista install dvd and get yourself to the command prompt by using the repair option.

You would need to run the bootrec tool with the following syntaxes:

• bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
• c:
• cd boot
• attrib bcd -s -h -r
• ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
• bootrec /RebuildBcd

This is assuming the boot folder is located in the C partition.

Does your new drive report its correct capacity to BIOS, or has it inherited the capacity of the original HDD?

See Q7b:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HD ... y_FAQ.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.