XP Hangs after Ghost 9

[user1]

I want to add my experience and solution for problems ghosting XP Home
and XP Pro with Ghost 9.

In a word, the solution I have located is fdisk /mbr, at least for XP
Home.

I removed the subject hard drive form its home computer, ghosted with
Ghost 9 as an image ("Backup" in Ghost terminology) onto a hard drive
in my 'bench' computer, then restored the Image to a new hard drive
destined for the original home computer. This did not work, yet.

When booted the new hard drive just hung at the login screen that is
pre-Welcome screen and just says Windows XP. Until I shut down, booted
to the boot disk from bootdisk.com, and performed the fdisk /mbr on the
C:\ drive (the 'restored' hard drive for the home computer.

The same issue arose using Ghost 9 for deployment of an XP Pro image
onto new (identical but multiple) machines. And the same issue arose
when copying -- via the same procedure noted in the previous paragraph
-- one hard drive to another on the same XP Pro machine.

I have not had a chance to verify that the fdisk /mbr procedure worked
on either of the scenarios outlined in the previous paragraph, but I
speculate that it will work in the second scenario.

For the first, sysprep is thge appopriate solution.

Scienter

 

[user1]

I have verified that the same solution applied to a hanging clone of XP
Professional as well -- when simply ghosting onto a new hard drive for
the same computer.

Scienter

 

[xfile]

Hi,

Just to share my experience -

I own Ghost 9 for years as it was purchased as a bundled product from
Symantec but I never really used it.

A few days ago, I sent my Dell notebook for a repair job (thought was power
connector problem but turned out to be a system board problem) and thought
it was a good opportunity to upgrade to a new HDD too.

Initially, I was not sure about which of the two approaches would be
better - to have a clean installation or to use Ghost 9 to "clone" an image
and then restore to a new HDD. In any case, I decided to use Ghost 9 after
several advises were given here.

After I got the notebook back, I put the image file into a 2.5" HDD in a USB
2.0 box attached to the notebook with the new unformatted and un-partitioned
new drive in it. I then used Ghost 9 to boot up the notebook (changed BIOS
for using CD-ROM to boot up), and then choose to restore a single drive from
Ghost 9.

I do not recall all the restore options but I do remember that I checked
them all (fill entire disk space, master boot records, and so on) as well as
have it checked integrity before doing restore.

It took about 1.5 hours for the entire process of restoring a 37G hard
drive, and for some unknown reasons, I lost 7G of the new HDD in the
process.

But the restore process is 99.9% success. I have not encountered any
problems since the first reboot for logging into Windows and accessing data
files and using most of applications.

The very first time when I logged into the restored Windows, it pumped out a
message saying something like this: Windows has completed installation of
the new device and needs to restart. I was not sure about what did that
mean but I did let it restart and no problems for that.

There are minor problems: A few programs seemed lost their original
activation or registration data, such as NIS 2006, Windows Genuine Advantage
certificate (don't know the correct name for which I care less), Adobe
Photoshop. But all these can be fixed either by online installations
(Windows Update), online activation, and/or by re-entering product key.

I was surprised though by Windows did not ask me to reactivate nor did
Office 2003. Some people said that this might be because Dell replaced the
system board with the same model - I don't know about this except I know
that the system board has been reworked based on the worksheet. The trust
relationships between the notebook and other computers are also ok.

In summary, I was very satisfied with the first experience of using Ghost 9.

Note: I read some articles about how people criticized Ghost 9 and even
claimed it is not an "actual" Ghost product as the ones produced by the
company before being merged by Symantec. I have too limited hands-on
experiences on Ghost (except I read a lot about it throughout the years),
but as far as for this particular mission of which I wished to get a new HDD
and to have the system to be fully functional within the minimum of time, it
has done a pretty good job.

Maybe I was just lucky or maybe it is the product has been designed for.

I use XP Pro w/ all patches and service packs and updates.

Hope this helps.

 

[Guest]

Ghost 9 or XCOPY would work if the board remained the same,but diffrent
board requires a new xp installation,you can try repair this copy,but youre
wasting youre time...

 

[xfile]

Wasting my time on?

Ghost 9 or XCOPY would work if the board remained the same,but diffrent
board requires a new xp installation,you can try repair this copy,but
youre
wasting youre time...