HELP! Big XP Pro boot problem after Norton Ghost 2003

[Mark Townsend]

Last night I installed Norton Ghost 2003 on my new windows XP Pro
machine. Of course, the software that I've installed to protect my new
machine from disaster has caused one of its own.

So I installed Norton, told it to clone my C: partition to my D:
partition and let it reboot.

The machine then rebooted to IBM Dos (I think), the Symantec logo
appeared but then it froze with just an hourglass on screen. So I
rebooted and got a startup menu asking if I wanted to try Norton again
or just go back to XP. I tried Norton again (same result) then
rebooted and selected XP.

STACK OVERFLOW
SYSTEM HALTED

Great.

So I've run XP Recovery Console.
Norton has created a 8mb partition, and mapped that to drive C:
My orginal C & D drives are now D & E
I've deleted the Norton partition, which made my drives go back to
their original positions, then rebooted.

Then I get:
"Reboot and select proper boot device
Or insert boot media in selected boot device"

I've checked BIOS startup order, it's fine.

I've gone back to Recovery console and run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT.
FIXMBR reports "This computer appears to have a non-standard or
invalid master boot record". Writing a new one and rebooting dosen't
have an effect though.

I've copied NTDETECT.COM and NTDLR from the original XP disk. No
effect.
I've used BOOTCFG to select the Windows installation. No effect.

I REALLY don't want to re-install XP, as this is a specialist music
machine tweaked
heavily by the dealer. So does anyone have any ideas that will help
me? Thanks!

 

[Len]

I have the same setup and just ran Ghost 2003 to back-up my XP Pro SP1
installation to an image file... no problem.

It seems that Ghost writes a virual partition to the C: drive as it still
can/t function on an NTFS native partition - it actually leaves the dat file
on the drive so it doesn't need to create it each time.

I'm not sure that running FIXMBR was a wise choice as in my experience it
usually creates more grief than cure. Not real sure it was a good idea to
delete the virtual partition either as this may have had unexpected effects
on the real partition?

Anyway, assuming that your installation has not been hosed by use of FIXMBR
and deleting the virtual partition two thoughts come to mind...
1) See if you can find a Symantic/Norton NG that might have some experience
with this type of issue or call their tech support.
2) You might try doing an in-place upgrade (maintenance reinstallation) of
XP - installing over top of current installation. The problem there is
setup may not see your current XP installation as a valid (repairable) OS.
All you can do is try.

Good Luck,
Len

 

[Stuart]

Not worked with XP much but if got a speare hard drive set
the spare as master do a clean install and change the
other to slave transfer the data and software over then
move it all back using Files and settings transfer wizard
that should sort it


Yours
Mr S C Owen
(Trainee Microsoft Enginee)