Dual Booting and Ghost Imaging

[David Brookes]

I normally work in a straight Windows Vista Business environment on my laptop
using Ghost 2003 to image my setup (which occasionally causes problems with
the image files but that is another issue) - I was trying to setup a dual
boot - XP SP3 and Vista SP1 environment with XP as the primary boot partition
installed (20 GB) and the rest of my laptop's HDD for Vista (130 GB approx) -
I got the dual booting done with BCDedit to fix the Boot Manager but after I
ghosted the image (successfully), verified the image (successful) and did a
test restoration (successful) - I was unable to boot into XP or Vista - XP
would complain at NTLDR and Vista at first about WINLOAD and after repairs
with my Vista DVD, would BSOD during boot - what did I do wrong and/or how
can I fix it?

 

[pupick]

When you did your restore you most likely corrupted the master boot record.
When you restored you may also have corrupted the partition tables. These
can be restored so that the drive is readable but in my experience it is
difficult to get the drive to boot.
In a similar situation I have saved the data on the drive by mounting it in
an external USB drive. Vista was able to restore the partition table so I
could retrieve data, in fact use the drive as a secondary drive. However I
could never find a way to get the drive to boot and ended up reinstalling
the OS and programs.
I am not sure why you are so dedicated to ghosting for a one user laptop.
You may be better off backing up data files however you choose and hanging
on to your installation discs.

 

[Malke]

I normally work in a straight Windows Vista Business environment on my
laptop using Ghost 2003 to image my setup (which occasionally causes
problems with the image files but that is another issue) - I was trying to
setup a dual boot - XP SP3 and Vista SP1 environment with XP as the
primary boot partition installed (20 GB) and the rest of my laptop's HDD
for Vista (130 GB approx) - I got the dual booting done with BCDedit to
fix the Boot Manager but after I ghosted the image (successfully),
verified the image (successful) and did a test restoration (successful) -
I was unable to boot into XP or Vista - XP would complain at NTLDR and
Vista at first about WINLOAD and after repairs with my Vista DVD, would
BSOD during boot - what did I do wrong and/or how can I fix it?

Googling for "Ghost 2003 + Vista" brings up a lot of links showing people
having similar problems. I expect your older version of Ghost isn't
completely compatible with Vista. I use Acronis True Image and love it, but
if you like Ghost you should probably upgrade to the latest version.

Malke