ghost problem

[Dave C.]

Using ghost from system works 2003, I save a partition to an image on a new
drive. Old drive removed, new drive installed. Do a restart and system wont
boot ie no boot device.

Ok set partition to active using xp diskmanager in another box (I think I
also used a dos boot floppy to set active partition once). new system now
boots but wont go past the welcome screen in xp, ie just before the login
screen showing users appears. I've managed to repeat the problem a few
times.I have tried the repair option and safe boots but still no luck.

any help much appreciated.

Some image programs will not write an image successfully to an NTFS
partition. In other words, the image program can't be used to reinstall
Windows XP on a new drive from an image. That is, unless you install XP on
FAT32, but who would do that??? Note I don't know about Ghost, if it has
that problem with NTFS partitions or not. I do know that I just did exactly
what you attempted to do with Acronis True Image 8. If the program hadn't
worked, I'd still be facing several hours of software reinstalls on this
system. I do know that I ruled out a couple of different disk image
programs as they are DOS based for emergency image recovery, and DOS has no
native support for NTFS. -Dave

 

[JAD]

sp2? known issues with 2p2 and ghosting

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=884130&product=windowsxpsp2

and do a repair install,,,,,,,from the other post,,,,,,,you should not
swap mainboards unless identical without installing the correct
chipset drivers...some people think that because the system is booted
all must be well....but if you look at the boot log you would see a
ton of unloaded DLL's and vxd's. the device manager jammed with
duplicates. There is no need to format unless there are sector
flaws,,but then I wouldn't use the drive.

 

[maurice]

Using ghost from system works 2003, I save a partition to an image on a new
drive. Old drive removed, new drive installed. Do a restart and system wont
boot ie no boot device.

Ok set partition to active using xp diskmanager in another box (I think I
also used a dos boot floppy to set active partition once). new system now
boots but wont go past the welcome screen in xp, ie just before the login
screen showing users appears. I've managed to repeat the problem a few
times.I have tried the repair option and safe boots but still no luck.

any help much appreciated.

 

[Bob Davis]

Using ghost from system works 2003, I save a partition to an image on a new
drive. Old drive removed, new drive installed. Do a restart and system wont
boot ie no boot device.

Ok set partition to active using xp diskmanager in another box (I think I
also used a dos boot floppy to set active partition once). new system now
boots but wont go past the welcome screen in xp, ie just before the login
screen showing users appears. I've managed to repeat the problem a few
times.I have tried the repair option and safe boots but still no luck.

I've ghosted and restored NTFS drives (XP Pro) many times in the past with
no problems, but this has always been done as a cloning operation, not from
an image. If the old drive and data are still available, try it again by
cloning.

I don't know if SP2 has issues with Ghost, but Symantec claims there are
none. I have no experience with SP2, yet.

 

[maurice]

thanks for the repsonse but ghost sees and writes to ntfs partitions even
when booted from a floppy, or it used to anyway!

 

[GTS]

I am unsure of your first sentence - you said you saved an image to the new
drive? An image is a compressed backp of the drive, it is not useable in any
way until the 'drive /partition from image' option is chosen, but your cant
do that if the image is on the same drive that you want to create.
What you need to do is choose the drive to drive, or partition to drive,
clone option, and the new drive will be an exact copy of the old (maybe with
more space though)
Ghost 2003 does handle NTFS & FAT32 perfectly.
The method I have used many times is to always keep the Ghost.exe dos
program in the root of the C: drive, install the new drive in the PC, boot
to DOS using a floppy or Win98/WinME CD, launch Ghost, Chose the drive to
drive copy option and thats it - remove the old drive, install the new one
as master and it boots just like the old one.
Just make sure it is Ghost 2003, as earlier versions don't work with NTFS.
The file size should be about 970K (earlier versions were about 600K)
HTH