Sounds like the order of the partitions got jumbled up in (parts of) the Windows configuration.

During the boot routine some hard-coded path's are used and it appears that there things go wrong.

Windows partitions are assigned a unique code that is later on translated into a drive letter. My suspicion is that here your problem starts. Suddenly all parts of the operating system are not in the location where the operating system expects them to be and a generic error code 0x3 will be served up to your screen.

Fixing this kind of errors might prove more time-consuming than re-installing or putting an image back. Laptop manufacturers have the nasty habit lately to put the recovery partition in front off the other partition. The reasoning behind this doesn't make a lick of sense to me. After all, this is the fastest part of the hard disk, which should be used for the Windows partition. After all, you will spend more time using the laptop instead of restoring the factory setup!

My guess is that they do this, so they can crank out laptops faster. Anyway, even the Windows installer gets "confused" by this on occasion.

-Shades (July 23, 2015, 09:23 PM)

I ran into this exact problem last year after replacing the hard drive in a Dell laptop. The restore process is supposed to hide that partition at the end of the restore process, but doesn't necessarily do so. IIRC I found a way to do it from the command line. If I get some time, I'll see if I can find the command I used.

According to their website, there's still a free (Basic) version.

I would also suggest to use the Windows 7 installer instead of the XP installer. Because that installer will not burden your hard disk with hard disk alignment problems like the XP installer does.

-Shades (May 18, 2015, 07:10 AM)

Seeing an 8MB chunk of unpartitioned space at the beginning definitely makes me think it's a Windows install problem. I ran across a similar issue when I had to replace a NT 4 Server install with the Terminal Services version. Specifically, it had to do with an unsupported drive (actually RAID) controller. Normally, if you told Windows to use the whole drive, the installer would leave 8MB of unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. However, because the IBM controller wasn't supported until at least SP3, it put the unpartitioned space at the beginning of the drive, and before the actual partition, instead.

Had I provided the driver on a disc, when prompted during Windows installation, it would have worked fine. Of course, IBM didn't bother to mention anything about it with the documentation, and finding anything on their website was practically impossible. In fact, they didn't even ship the driver disc with it. I ended up using a Win 98 boot disc to partition and format to FAT16, after which Windows installed normally.