Drive-Drive copy w/Ghost, boot hangs

[Pat Coghlan]

My current system is: SATA, C: (primary, active), D: (primary)

I have a new (larger) SATA drive (one primary and one extended
partition) which I'm trying to copy my system to w/Ghost.

When I copy over the two partitions, marking the new system partition as
active, my machine hangs after the WinXP splash screen. I get a blue
screen with a small Windows logo; the same one that appears for a few
moments on a working system once someone has entered a logon password.
In this case, however, it jumps to this screen from the WinXP splash
screen and just stays there.

I should add that this is what happens when the original drive is
disconnected. If I leave it connected, WinXP boots from the new drive
(G and continues to reference D: on the old drive. Therefore, this
problem seems to be related to the way drive letters are assigned.

This always used to work before, so I'm puzzled as to why I'm having
trouble now.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I'm thinking I should backup to an
external USB drive and restore C/D to the new hard drive using Ghost
from CD, but I'd like to understand why that might be required.

 

[Guest]

Ghosting or mirroring xp off or to a SATA drive doesnt work like
an IDE hd would.Most SATA & RAID hds need to have the drivers installed
before xp is,simply copying them thru XCOPY or ghost doesnt cut it.

 

[Brian A]

I had a similar situation after copying from PATA to SATA w/Ghost 2003. I tried the
recommended switches -fni (disables direct IDE access support for IDE hard disk
operations - same as the -noide switch), -fns (disables direct ASPI/SCSI access
support for SCSI hard disk operations - same as the -noscsi switch), -fnx (disables
extended Int13 support for hard disks) in combos and alone without success. What I
finally wound up having to do was:

Boot the original PATA drive.
Enter the registry.
Delete all of the entries except for the default in the right pane at:
hkey_local_machine\system\mounted devices
Shutdown.
Remove the PATA and connect the SATA.
Reboot.
Shutdown.
Connect the PATA and boot to disk maintanence w/BING boot disk.
Remove the Active bit from the PATA and reboot.

As I mentioned, the disk involved were a PATA and SATA unlike your setup. It would
be your own choice if you decided to try it.

I'm not sure if this would help or have any ramifications, yet another thing to try
would be booting to the Recovery Console and running fixmbr and/or fixboot.
How to install the Windows Recovery Console
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;216417

How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654

How to remove Windows Recovery Console
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555032

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm



--

Brian A. Sesko { MS MVP_Shell/User }
Conflicts start where information lacks.
http://basconotw.mvps.org/

Suggested posting do's/don'ts: http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Anna]

My current system is: SATA, C: (primary, active), D: (primary)

I have a new (larger) SATA drive (one primary and one extended partition)
which I'm trying to copy my system to w/Ghost.

When I copy over the two partitions, marking the new system partition as
active, my machine hangs after the WinXP splash screen. I get a blue
screen with a small Windows logo; the same one that appears for a few
moments on a working system once someone has entered a logon password. In
this case, however, it jumps to this screen from the WinXP splash screen
and just stays there.

I should add that this is what happens when the original drive is
disconnected. If I leave it connected, WinXP boots from the new drive
(G and continues to reference D: on the old drive. Therefore, this
problem seems to be related to the way drive letters are assigned.

This always used to work before, so I'm puzzled as to why I'm having
trouble now.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I'm thinking I should backup to an
external USB drive and restore C/D to the new hard drive using Ghost from
CD, but I'd like to understand why that might be required.

Pat:
I'm not sure (to say the least!) that the following explains why you're
having the problem you've described, but it's a possibility I think...

Presumably you cloned the contents of your "old" HDD to the "new" HDD. At
least I think you undertook a disk-to-disk cloning operation with Ghost,
right? (The fact that these are SATA HDDs shouldn't be relevant here).

Immediately following the disk cloning operation, you booted your system
with *both* HDDs connected. If that's what you did, that may account for the
problem. In many (but not all) cases, immediately following the disk-cloning
operation you should disconnect your source disk and boot *only* with the
destination HDD connected. Otherwise there's a good chance a boot problem
involving the newly-cloned HDD will occur similar to the one you're
describing. Again, not always, but in a significant number of cases.

Again, I'm unsure if the preceding applies in your current situation. I may
even be misunderstanding the precise nature of your problem. But if what
I've surmised is relevant to your situation, why don't you simply start over
and retry the disk cloning operation along the lines I've described?
Anna

 

[Pat Coghlan]

In this case I'm going from SATA to SATA, so hopefully surgery on the
registry won't be necessary...not that it is acceptable to have to jump
through these kind of hoops just to upgrade a hard drive!

 

[Pat Coghlan]

I'm going to try again, this time making sure that only one drive is
connected after the imaging operation.

I'll let you know.

Thanks.

-Pat

 

[Pat Coghlan]

Here is what is in my registry currently.

Are most of the \??\ devices junk?

 

[Brian A]

If you're going to delete the entries right click on Mounted Devices and click
Export in the popup menu.
Give it a name and save it to a place easy to get at in the event you may need to
import it back into the registry.
Delete everything except the default value in the right pane and close out.
Reboot with only the one device connected and it will be re-enumerated.
If all went well connect the next device, boot up and it will be re-enumerated.
As mentioned before, if it still reverts back to booting to the original device, you
will have to remove it's Active bit before connecting it once the new device is
booting as the boot device.

--

Brian A. Sesko { MS MVP_Shell/User }
Conflicts start where information lacks.
http://basconotw.mvps.org/

Suggested posting do's/don'ts: http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Pat Coghlan]

Apparently I didn't disconnect the old drive after rebooting, only
changed the order of the drives in the BIOS.

With just the new drive, it booted okay, although it couldn't find the
D: (user files) drive. I just had to assign it a drive letter.

Thanks.

-Pat