Ghosting a Win XPE disk

[Jeff Johnson]

Greetings,

I am admitting up front, I am an XPE novice and not even a developer.
Here is my predicament.

I have a XPE based system with a standard IDE disk (rotating,
not CF). The disk is acting funny and I need to replace it. I tried
ghosting it to a new drive and it failed. Ghost worked fine, recognized
the 8001MB boot partition and the remaining data partition ~110GB. The
ghost target was a 400GB drive and it ghosted the two partitions without
error. The new 400GB drive would not boot.

I have seen comments about doing a raw copy "ghost -ir" but that would
turn the 400GB into a 120GB disk (I believe).

Can anyone tell me how I can save the boot drive and get a larger data
partition using ghost or a similar clone method? The version of XPE is
fully licensed but I do not have the developer kit to recreate the image.

Thanks,

Jeff

 

[Jeff Johnson]

A follow up..

The ghost process I ran (that failed) runs perfectly cloning a standard
Windows XP (non-embedded) installation. I am smart enough to know there
is something unique about XPE but I do not have the experience to know
what it is.

Thanks again..

--Jeff

 

[Stuart Langley]

Do you know if the XPe system has an enhanced write filter partition? You
can tell this if there is a partition entry in the partition table with the
type ID "45" in the mbr.

If this is the case, there is no option other than to do the raw copy, and
sacrifice the disk space.

Regards,

Stuart

 

[Jeff Johnson]

Stuart,

First, thanks for taking a moment to consider my position. Can't be too
grateful in today's world.

Suppose I am lucky and there is no enhanced write filter partition.
Then how do I accomplish the copy? I dont want to bring the drive up and
down too many times, I think I am on borrowed time as it is. I do know
there are only two partitions. While I do not know their exact type I do
know that both have a file structure that Ghost can read because I was
able to watch the file by file status during the copy of both partitions:

Partition 0: 8001 MB, had visible files during ghost process, exact type
unknown
Partition 1: 110 GB, had visible files during ghost process, exact type
unknown. Labeled as a data partition.

After ghosting and being unable to boot the new drive I put both in the
system and booted. I was able to see the filesystems on both partitions
of both drives. In disk manager the two drives looked identical, except
the new drive had a larger second partition (400GB drive).

If it matters, this is a video security system (DVR) and runs on a
Celeron-D with standard IDE drive for a disk.

Thanks again,

Jeff

 

[Stuart Langley]

What exactly does "Unable to boot" mean?

Do you get some form of BIOS error message, BSOD or something else?

Regards,

Stuart

 

[Jeff Johnson]

The bios is fine. It sees the drive as the boot disk and once POST
completes it accesses the drive. The screen flashes an underscore cursor
for a few blinks then the screen goes dark, the disk activity LED
flashes for 2 secs and then the motherboard hard resets and the POST
process repeats. I can leave it like this and it will loop endlessly.
The original drive boots into Windows XPE after POST.

--Jeff

 

[Stuart Langley]

Add the flags in boot.ini "/noguiboot /sos" so you can get some idea of what
is being loaded and where it crashes, and see if you can deduce something
from this.

Regards,

Stuart

 

[Jeff Johnson]

Thanks for the pointer. I will have to attempt tomorrow. The Mrs. is
calling and loudly... =)