Hi guys,

I'm glad I found this forum!  Great site!

Anyways, I have been trying for the last 12 hours to create an image of my C drive, and I just can't seem to do it.

I've used Norton Ghost 9.0, Norton Ghost 2003, and Acronis True Image Server for Windows.

SAME PROBLEM EACH TIME!

I'm going crazy!!

PC Starts to boot, gets VERY close, and the light blue screen with the windows logo just hangs there!  This is right before it SHOULD say  Loading your Settings... (Or something like that).

I am going to shoot myself in a minute.

I have a SATA 200GB Seagate, divided into c: (15g) and the rest is my D: Drive, where I store my data.

I just bought a 250GB Maxtor.  I partitioned it in two.  Copied over everything to this new D: drive.

I left a 19GIG partition at the beginning which is SUPPOSED to be my NEW C: Drive.

I must have created 15 images today.  First on unallocated space.   Formatted Space.  With a drive letter.  Without a drive letter.

I changed my BIOS to not use Enhanced ATA mode.

Same problem.

Booted off the Windows XP SP2 CD, and tried to repair it.  No luck.  Did a FIXMBR, and FIXBOOT (I think that's what it's called)

Didn't help.

I did notice that the pagefile file isn't copied from the old partition to the new one.

I was thinking of turning off the pagefile (I do have 1gb of RAM), making the image, booting up, and then using the pagefile again.

Guys, I really hope you can point me in the right direction.  I've been surfing like crazy...  I see I am not the only one who is stuck at that welcome screen with the logo, but I just can't find the right solution.

I truly need some assistance.  I'll try anything!

And remember -- I'm going from SATA to SATA, so that should be easy, no?

Helllllllllllllllllllllp!

Thanks!

Mike

Did you use Ghost 2003 from the Windows interface or a DOS boot floppy?

Hey DaddyO,

Thanks for the quick reply.

I actually ran Ghost 2003 from Windows.  Of course, it rebooted the machine with PC-DOS, and did the image right from the DOS-based portion of the program.

Last night before bed, I tried running GHOST.EXE from an old floppy.  I had a Windows ME boot disk lying around.

Strangely, the program hung on the first screen.

If you think that running it off a floppy will solve it, I'm all ears.  Is there a certain OS I must use on the floppy.

By the way, both drives are NTFS, of course.

Any further ideas are most welcome!!

I have NEVER met a computer problem that I was not able to solve alone, or with help from others.  I'll be dammed if I can't copy this drive!

Thanks!

Mike

Hi again!

Okay, I just did some further research, and I see that Windows ME could be causing a problem.

I will learn a little bit more about running it off a boot disk (hopefully I could find the proper switches to use), and I'll take it from there...!

MG

Michael_G.

Problem is probably letting WinXP 'see' that second HDD--sticky partition drive-letter assignments occur.

Are you able to use a DOS Ghost boot floppy and access your SATA HDD's in DOS?

Steps:

1.  Create Std Ghost Boot Disk using Ghost 2003 in WinXP
2.  Boot to DOS Ghost
3.  Do a Disk-to-Disk clone of original HDD to new HDD
4.  Exit Ghost and turn off system (do not reboot to WinXP)
5.  Remove original HDD and put new HDD in it's place
6.  See if everything boots okay now

Report  back with the results of your efforts!

GOT IT!!!!!

NightOwl, I basically did what you suggested as you posted your response!

This is my advice I''d give to other people having problems:

1 - Forget about Ghost 9 and ANY other software that does ANYTHING from Windows.

2 - Create a Win98 bootable floppy with Ghost on it.

3 - Run it from the floppy (first make sure you have an empty partition)

4 - Do the copy.

5 - Run FDISK to make the new partition Active.

6 - Remove the old drive and reboot.

That was it!

NOTHING from Windows would work.  Not Ghost 9, 2003, True Image 8...

NOTHING would get past the Blue Screen with the windows logo.

No matter how sexy the GUIs may be, and how cool it is to do a drive copy while in Windows... forget it!!

A Windows system disk is a big enough pain to deal with.
...Throw in an NTFS file system....
...Throw in SATA drives...

...and you are looking for trouble!

Make a boot disk, run Ghost 2003 from there, and that's it!!!!!!!

I wasted 14 hours trying every other way!

MG

Re: "Forget about Ghost 9 and ANY other software that does ANYTHING from Windows."

Is not this what we have been saying all along??

Buy that man a beer.  :)

http://ghost.radified.com/norton_ghost_90.htm

Michael_G. & Rad


Quote:

"Forget about Ghost 9 and ANY other software that does ANYTHING from Windows."

In fairness to Ghost 9.x--could have probably accomplished this task if one used the 'Recovery Disk' CD and booted to the 'Recovery Environment'--I think you can do a Disk-to-Disk (what Symantec calls 'bare metal') clone from there--but not from within Windows OS.

One day, hopefully later than sooner, there will be a new file system which Ghost 2003 can not handle and my bet is that Symantec won't update Ghost 2003. I don't know if Longhorn will be launched with a new file system but I seem to remember an article, indicating that this would not be unlikely. If so, I hope that Longhorn can be run on old trusted NTFS as well which means that my copy of Ghost 2003 will soldier on.

At the time when Ghost 2003 has become obsolete, we can only hope that the current version of Ghost (10?) can do everything that the Ghost 2003 could ...... :-X ...... and just as easily.

Christer

[quote author=NightOwl]
In fairness to Ghost 9.x--could have probably accomplished this task if one used the 'Recovery Disk' CD and booted to the 'Recovery Environment'--I think you can do a Disk-to-Disk (what Symantec calls 'bare metal') clone from there--but not from within Windows OS.[/quote]

Afraid not NightOwl. The Recovery Environment is not for imaging or cloning. Only if you use the Ghost plugin for BartPE XPE.

Michael_G, when you were using Ghost 9 did you try the combination of having the slave HD unformatted (unallocated space), used Ghost 9 "Copy Drives" to only copy the C: drive, chose Drive Letter of "None", ticked Copy MBR,  did the copy, shut down the computer, not allowing computer to reboot, removed the master HD, switched jumpers , etc. .

Re: "a new file system which Ghost 2003 can not handle and my bet is that Symantec won't update Ghost 2003"

Now *there's* a scary thought.

I don't think it will be a problem, tho. Cuz remember how Ghost 2002 didn't support NTFS, yet it *would* image NTFS drives, as long as you stored the image to a FAT32 partition?

I think the same thing would be possible, even if Longhorn came out with a different file system that Ghost 2003 didn't support. We could simply create one NTFS partition and store our Longhorn images there.

Hi Brian,

I actually didn't copy drive to drive... I did partition to partition.

My boot partition is 15gigs.

I was moving it to a 19 gig one.

The other partitions were around 200gigs a piece, filled with MP3's and videos and stuff.

I really didn't want to do an exact copy of the drive.

Just C to C.  

I tried doing it with a drive letter assigned.  Without a drive letter assigned.  Formatted.  Not formatted.  Allocated space.  unallocated space.

I always removed it while rebooting.

Although, if memory serves, I once left it in, booted off the new drive, and midway, I think it jumped to the old partition.

I also switched around the SATA cables, too.

I disabled Smart Sector copying (or whatever it's called).

Lemme tell you... I may not be a computer genius, but I have never, ever worked so long on a problem.

I'm glad I made that boot disk!

First shot, and it worked!

MG

Hi again Michael,

I'm just interested in what you did in Ghost 9. There is a terminology problem as Ghost 9 doesn't have a "drive to drive" facility. It has "Copy Drives" which really means copy partitions and I assume that is what you were doing. There are only two choices, Copy Drives and create image. With Copy Drives you can only copy one partition at a time. If there are several partitions they must be done sequentially. I assume you ticked  "set drive Active" but do you recall ticking Copy MBR? The MBR needs to be copied with just one of the Copy Drive processes.

I plan to do a Copy Drives next week to confirm that it really works so the choices you made will be helpful to me.

Quote:

I don't think it will be a problem, tho. Cuz remember how Ghost 2002 didn't support NTFS, yet it *would* image NTFS drives, as long as you stored the image to a FAT32 partition?

Yes but Ghost 2002 could read NTFS! What if Ghost 2003 can't read a future file system, like Win9X can't read NTFS?

Christer

Re: "but Ghost 2002 could read NTFS!"

I don't know if that's true. Ghost 2002 operated from DOS, which does not support NTFS, and didn't have any patches to write to NTFS like v2003 does.

I think, at the image level, Ghost is simply reading *bits*. I don't think it even recognizes the file system. The file system just looks like another group of bits. On - off - off - on, etc.

I could be wrong, but I think the file system only comes into play when Ghost is *writing* the images, cuz the images have to go IN/ON the file sytems. That's why "NTFS support" was claimed for v2003, even tho v2002 could image (and restore) NTFS drives just fine .. as long as the image was written to a FAT32 partition.

So I feel the file system of the source would be immaterial, so to speak.

Ghost also has the ability to do a bit-for-bit copy. I'm guessing it would also have thw ability to create an image with this bit-for-bit feature.

I mean, bits are bits right? Whether they represent part of a file-system, a document or an mP3.

Today, is there *any* file system that Ghost cannot image? .. as long as the image is written to a supported file system.

Where the source is concerned, "bits are bits." That's my story and I'm sticking to it.  :)

I wonder what Dan Goodell think. He seems to have a handle on this type of stuff.

Thoughts?

Rad,
You may be right on this but I'm not sure.

Aren't there some small applications that run in DOS and can read NTFS? I'm pretty sure there is and it would be an easy addition to Ghost, making it able to read NTFS. Writing to NTFS might be a different story.

To be able to exclude some files, such as the pagefile, Ghost must be able to read the Master File Table and that too is written on NTFS.

When a drive has been used, there is free space that has old information on it. Deleted files that have no reference in the MFT. Ghost, unless You do a Disk-to-Disk and use a specific switch to force sector copy, will not include the free space. In order to acchieve that exclusion, I believe that Ghost has to read at least the MFT ...... :-/ ...... which is written on NTFS.

Christer

I've thought about those things, such as Ghost excluding the page file, which resides above the file-system level, and realize that, to some degree, you must be correct.

Reading & writing are two separte functions. I recall there was a free prgm that allowed you to read NTFS from DOS, but, if you wanted to *write* to NTFS from DOS, you had to purchase the pay version.

Sorry for hi-jacking the thread. It just seemed to prompt some thoughts.

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030617/index.html
from which I quote:


Quote:

In the end, Win FS will probably emerge as an optional file system beside FAT and NTFS. It's also possible that Win FS will supersede its predecessors, however. That would most likely produce problems for multi-boot systems, since the only way Windows XP, Longhorn and Linux would all be able to access one and the same volume would be through complex methods - if at all.

Christer

Rad wrote:
"I wonder what Dan Goodell think."

I've been out of town for a week.  My wife just closed on a real estate purchase (second home) up in Oregon.  It's an empty house, so I didn't have internet access while there.  I would have made internet access a top priority, but it's her house and she thought furniture was the priority.  ;D

Anyway, it looks like this thread has run its course, so I won't prolong it.  Besides, looks like it got widely off-topic, anyway.  :)