BAD_POOL_HEADER Due to MBR Issue
After replacing my hard drives late last year, my backups were not running. When I tried to do manual backups using Norton Ghost, I got the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) with the message “BAD_POOL_HEADER”.
MicroSoft’s Knowledge Base can lead you astray on this one unless you read it carefully, saying its due to a device driver, new software or hardware. The only new software installed is TurboTax, and I highly doubted it was causing this problem.
I found the solution at TechSpot.com. Seems the drive partitioning software Seagate uses, a variation of Acronis True Image called “DiscWizard Disc Clone”, gives the new cloned drive a new disk signature in the master boot record (MBR) and writes to the registry:
The disk clone operation gives the cloned disk a new signature (probably in order to prevent conflict with the source disk), and also changes the signature in the following registry key on the cloned disk:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
The result being that Windows starts without recognizing the disk as a new drive. Since the disk is not considered a new no update is performed on keys that needs update when the disk signature is changes (like those of the Volume Shadow Copy Provider).
The solution is provided at TechSpot.com linked previously, and the fix can be done from a Start*Run*CMD DOS box (I didn’t have to boot to a clean copy of Windows.)
So it is “new hardware” … but the problem is infrequent enough that I never suspected my backups weren’t running due to the new drives. Norton Ghost 10 has been troublesome for me, with an awkward interface and too much happening under the hood that you can’t see.
It seems to be working. I have removed the troublesome Acronis and also Norton Ghost products for now, and I’m running a Windows XP Pro backup in the background. The XP Pro backup program seems fine.
