Hello all,

I'm having serious problems getting XP Pro working from Ghost v9 backup images.  I've started the thread in the following url http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=23145 at an XP related forum but I fear we're running out of options there.  If you would be kind enough to read my most recent post there on page 7 (dated today 12/23/06) it will fill you in on some of what's been done, and though it would be better to read it from the start I realize that's a lot to ask.

The problem is basically this.... After several successful reboots into XP, XP will load its boot screen (the one with the blue progress bar) and the progress bar never stops running.  I can't get to the logon screen, cannot boot into safe mode, nor boot using any of the other options in XP's advanced boot menu (last known good config, etc).  My only way to get XP running again is to perform another Ghost restore of the D partition (where XP's OS files are located), then run it until XP craps out again.  I must have done that 30 or 40 times already, this has been going on since the 1st week of November.

The reason for restoring Ghost images is that the hard disk went bad.  The machine was working perfectly up to that point for well over a year.  The ONLY thing that changed in the machine's configuration was the replacement of the bad 40gb disk with a new 200gb disk.  And yes, the Promise Ultra100 controller does have the latest BIOS and driver updates that support drives over 137gb.

I am so frustrated and tired of typing about this that I don't know where to start here.  In fact it may not even be a Ghost related problem but there are indications it could be, and I know of no better place to turn for Ghost advice than here.  I'd dread the thought of repeating all the details I posted in that thread, so I'd really appreciate it if someone could review the details there and then post back here with some questions or advice.

Thanks

I read through your other thread.  I'm not sure what the answer is but here are some of the factors that may have gotten you to where you are now:

1. I assume your 200gb drive was a new blank unformatted drive.  Correct?  Ghost 9 does not have a "copy the entire disk" option, as you probably know.  It looks like you booted from the Ghost 9 CD, and then restored each partition, one at a time.  Correct?  Did you copy them onto the 200gb drive in the SAME physical order as they existed originally?

2. I noticed that on your Disk Managment screen shot that the "Boot Partition" is D (WXP) and not C (WXPBOOT).  That needs some research.  Looks like it is booting directly to xp, and not your boot manager.

Your problems are likely a combination of the new drive not being same partition layout as the old drive, and drive letter confusions.  You are probably always going to have problems because of the boot manager and the fact that xp is not c: drive.

Now that XP has seen the new 200gb drive, it has included drive info in the MountedDevices registry entries.  That is also contributing to the issue now.

Have you ever booted with the 49 gb drive, and had the 200gb drive also connected or assigned drive letter?  That will cause the 49gb xp system to get confused.

Because of these two critical items (boot manager and xp not c: drive), you must be certain your target 200gb is created EXACTLY in the same physical layout as your original.

I just discovered you had 7 pages of posts in your reference thread on AumHa forums.

Originally I just read the one page you mentioned.  So I probably don't understand the full history of what you have done or tried.

Is there some reason you have the Promise IDE drive controller?  I'm assuming it must be an older pc or one that doesn't support hard drives larger than 137 gb?

Have you tried removing the Promise controller, connecting the 200gb Seagate drive directly to the motherboard, formatting it, and installing XP from scratch from your slip streamed cd?  See how that works for awhile.  Then reinstall your software.  

In the long run you'll have a simpler stable standard configuration.  Use the XP compatability settings to run any older programs under XP.  Windows 98 is 8+ years old now, and not even supported.

Sorry, but this is probably not the answer you wanted, but that is what I would do myself if I had this problem.  Between the boot manager, Promise card, non-standard boot drive, and partition fiddling, you're in a "high risk" environment.

I had the same exact results using a Promise Ultra 100 contoller. I upgraded the BIOS the same as you did because the Promise website said the new BIOS would support drives larger than 137 GB. They lied!!!!!! After a number of times having Windows wiped out, I upgraded the card to the Ultra 133. Problem solved. This has nothing top do with Ghost. The Promise card is to blame.

John. wrote on Dec 23^rd, 2006 at 6:10pm:

I read through your other thread.  I'm not sure what the answer is but here are some of the factors that may have gotten you to where you are now: 1. I assume your 200gb drive was a new blank unformatted drive.  Correct?  Ghost 9 does not have a "copy the entire disk" option, as you probably know.  It looks like you booted from the Ghost 9 CD, and then restored each partition, one at a time.  Correct?  Did you copy them onto the 200gb drive in the SAME physical order as they existed originally? 2. I noticed that on your Disk Managment screen shot that the "Boot Partition" is D (WXP) and not C (WXPBOOT).  That needs some research.  Looks like it is booting directly to xp, and not your boot manager.

Ghost4me,

Thank you so much for taking the time to familiarize yourself with my problem.  To answer your questions....

1-Correct, the 200gb was new and unformatted.  Correct, I booted from the Ghost 9 CD and performed the restores, one partition at a time.  Yes, they were restored in the EXACT SAME physical order they appeared on the original disk.

2-The names MS uses in XP's Disk Management are kind of counter intuitive, and can be misleading.  That is, they use the term "System" for the partition XP boots from, and the term "Boot" for the partition that holds the XP operating system files.  I've used the name WXPBOOT for the partition XP boots from, and the name WXP for the partition where XP's OS files are located.  My system does boot to my boot manager, and when I select XP the boot manager makes WXPBOOT the active primary partition it boots from (which becomes drive C:).  Then from the boot.ini file found in the WXPBOOT partition, XP is able to find the OS files located at D:\WXP, and then boots the OS.


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Your problems are likely a combination of the new drive not being same partition layout as the old drive, and drive letter confusions.  You are probably always going to have problems because of the boot manager and the fact that xp is not c: drive.

It is the same layout as the old drive.  If the partitions were out of order I wouldn't be able to boot into XP at all, yet I'm able to successfully boot into XP several times before the problem starts.  Usually 3 to 6 times, but I've had as many as 26 successful boots before the blue progress bar starts looping.


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Now that XP has seen the new 200gb drive, it has included drive info in the MountedDevices registry entries.  That is also contributing to the issue now.

I have tried deleting those registry entries and letting XP repopulate them on the next boot, which it did.  Quite often I'll get several more successful boots from XP before it finally craps out.  I've done it both ways, with and without deleting the entries, it seems to make no difference.


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Have you ever booted with the 49 gb drive, and had the 200gb drive also connected or assigned drive letter?  That will cause the 49gb xp system to get confused.

I have never had the 40gb and the 200gb disks in the machine at the same time.  Once the 40gb disk started acting up and XP reported disk events in Event Viewer it was immediately removed and replaced with the 200gb disk.  At that point I restored Ghost backup images from a 3rd hard disk, a 120gb disk I use with a removable drive bay enclosure for backups only.  Once backups are restored I remove the removable hard disk.


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Because of these two critical items (boot manager and xp not c: drive), you must be certain your target 200gb is created EXACTLY in the same physical layout as your original.

Yes, I am absolutely certain that the target 200gb was created EXACTLY in the same physical layout as the original disk.  It wasn't easy with Ghost though, because Ghost doesn't list backups in the order they appear on the original disk.  It lists them alphabetically, so one has to know the layout beforehand.


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I just discovered you had 7 pages of posts in your reference thread on AumHa forums. Originally I just read the one page you mentioned.  So I probably don't understand the full history of what you have done or tried.

Yes, the last page I referenced is kind of where I'm at now.  The history leading up to that point contains the bulk of troubleshooting attempts, and there are many.  I realize it is a lot of reading, unfortunately:-(


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Is there some reason you have the Promise IDE drive controller?  I'm assuming it must be an older pc or one that doesn't support hard drives larger than 137 gb?

Yes, it's an older pc.  My motherboard natively supports ATA 33, I have the Promise controller mainly because it supports ATA 100 transfer rate.  I've had hard disks in and out of this machine before and never had a problem, but they were all under 137gb.  Also, about a year ago I restored an image of the same WXP partition without a problem, but it was restored to the same 40gb disk the image was taken from.  The machine has never seen a disk larger than 137gb until now.


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Have you tried removing the Promise controller, connecting the 200gb Seagate drive directly to the motherboard, formatting it, and installing XP from scratch from your slip streamed cd?  See how that works for awhile.  Then reinstall your software.

Well, the reason I'm restoring from Ghost backup images is to avoid installing XP from scratch.  I have too much time invested in this XP setup.  I have another machine almost identical to this one, both are networked, and each were carefully configured to work with the other.  Your idea, however, is worthy of note in that it would isolate the controller.  I'll have to think about using it, perhaps as a troubleshooting technique as opposed to a final solution.


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In the long run you'll have a simpler stable standard configuration.  Use the XP compatability settings to run any older programs under XP.  Windows 98 is 8+ years old now, and not even supported.

I don't have any older programs, but I do have an old printer that HP never bothered to support when XP was released.  That's mainly why I keep W98.  There are no HP drivers/utilities that allow me to maintain the printer with XP, such as cleaning & aligning print heads, etc.  HP did recommend using a driver for another printer in XP, it works but is very limited.

Also keep in mind that W98 always works, even when XP fails.


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Sorry, but this is probably not the answer you wanted, but that is what I would do myself if I had this problem.  Between the boot manager, Promise card, non-standard boot drive, and partition fiddling, you're in a "high risk" environment.

Perhaps.  I certainly appreciate your suggestions.  However, I don't believe the boot drive issue is as non-standard as you may think.  More complicated, yes, but not unusual in many circles to have an NT based OS boot from a tiny partition at the front of one disk but load it's OS files from another disk or drive.

mustang wrote on Dec 23^rd, 2006 at 8:59pm:

I had the same exact results using a Promise Ultra 100 contoller. I upgraded the BIOS the same as you did because the Promise website said the new BIOS would support drives larger than 137 GB. They lied!!!!!! After a number of times having Windows wiped out, I upgraded the card to the Ultra 133. Problem solved. This has nothing top do with Ghost. The Promise card is to blame.

Mustang,
Thank you for your reply.  Please tell me more about the results you had.  What symptoms led you to believe Windows was wiped out?  Was it an endlessly looping blue progress bar on the XP boot screen that never allowed the XP logon screen to appear?

When your machine was booting, did the Promise 100 BIOS display the correct size of the large disk?

In addition to upgrading the new BIOS on the Promise Ultra100 card, did you also update to the new Windows driver supplied by Promise?  Both the new BIOS and the new drivers must be present for large drive support in Windows.

Help_Seeker


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Yes, it's an older pc.  My motherboard natively supports ATA 33, I have the Promise controller mainly because it supports ATA 100 transfer rate.  I've had hard disks in and out of this machine before and never had a problem, but they were all under 137gb.  Also, about a year ago I restored an image of the same WXP partition without a problem, but it was restored to the same 40gb disk the image was taken from.  The machine has never seen a disk larger than 137gb until now.

I think I would take that as a very strong indication of where the problem lies!  Even though add-on hardware *says* it's compatible or solves a 137 MB HDD limitation--there are so many systems out there with unique configurations and BIOS capabilities--there's just no way hardware, or software for that matter, can be made to function successfully with all those combinations--unless the maker is made aware of the problem(s), and their engineers solve the issue(s).

The simple experiment to confirm this is to put say a 120 GB HDD on the system, and see if the problem still re-occurs!  Alternatively, get a different controller card and see if that helps.

I have a system that is happy to allow two IDE optical drives to be installed--but, if I attempt to install a third IDE optical drive, I get all sorts of aberrant behavior and error messages--for whatever reason, the BIOS will not allow more than two IDE optical drives!  I have a second system where I have three optical drives installed with no problems at all.

Help_Seeker,

Thanks for your detailed reply.  It's evident from this and the AumHA forum, you've tried a lot.


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I have never had the 40gb and the 200gb disks in the machine at the same time.  Once the 40gb disk started acting up and XP reported disk events in Event Viewer it was immediately removed and replaced with the 200gb disk.  At that point I restored Ghost backup images from a 3rd hard disk, a 120gb disk I use with a removable drive bay enclosure for backups only.  Once backups are restored I remove the removable hard disk.

I'm glad to see that XP was never booted with both disks in the PC at the same time; that can cause gradual corruption.

NightOwl and Mustang both gave excellent tips.  The reason I also mentioned removing the Promise IDE card was to eliminate it as a possibility.  You can probably change one of the Seagate jumpers to restrict the drive size to less than 137 gb if you want to test that.

Just the fact that Promise card is seeing a newer technology hard drive, and especially one that is faster and has different timing for i/o to and from your motherboard to the drive, could explain that theory.  Wonder how cheap a newer 133 Promise card would be?  Probably not very costly.

Glad to see you have a good save Ghost image backup(s).  If/when you try again, I would avoid manipulating the partitions with Partition Magic until much later, like after it is working for several weeks.  You don't want to introduce another variable.

As an aside, what model HP printer do you have and what are you trying to print with it?  You should be able to get that to work under XP.

Finally, I would be careful about trying an XP repair install on your 200gb system.  I haven't ever heard of anyone that has a d: system drive doing that.  I'm worried that the repair install may set xp back to c: which you don't want.  (I could be wrong on this point, but just be careful).

Help_Seeker, this forum has never seen a case in which a successfully restored Ghost 9/Ghost 10 image has failed to run properly due a problem with Ghost, to the best of my recollection.  Hopefully, you won't be the first!  The recommendations of Ghost4me, NightOwl and Mustang are all worthy of pursuit and trial.

Please do post the results of your continued efforts.

Hey man, get that controller upgraded to the 133 or stay with a 120 GB hard drive. No kidding!!!!!! You're wasting alot of people's time here, not to mention your own.

I had a great deal of experience with these cards years ago.  On a good motherboard they were great. They used to double the speed of the hards drives on older systems like your's. You could actally see this running Ghost from DOS. On a not so good motherboard, they would cause Windows to become unstable. You would get a BSOD usually in the first 10 min. of use. Remove the card and the system would be stable. Not so hard to understand when you consider the HDD speed running through the PCI bus was doubled.

I had your problem on a customer's computer I had built. It was a good Asus motherboard and ran very stable with the Ultra 100 card and 120 GB drives. I updated both the BIOS and the drivers of the 100 card. Replacing the drives with 200 GB drives resulted in your exact symptoms. He would get a day or two of use and then Windows wouldn't boot. Sound familiar? Examining the disk showed large blocks of files were missing. This guy talked to another guy that told him the Promise card might be the problem. I insisted it was not the problem and showed him the Promise website. Sound familiar? Finally, I tried replacing the card with an Ultra 133 just to prove this other guy wrong. Well, didn't I look bad when it solved the problem!

A quick look at Price Watch shows the 133 is available for $53. To replace the card follow this procedure:

1. Leave the drives connected to the Ultra 100 card. Put the Ultra 133 card into an empty PCI slot.

2. Boot into Windows and install the driver for the 133 card when you see the New Hardware Wizard.

3. Shut down, remove the 100 card and connect the drives to the 133 card. (You can switch the 133 card to the slot the 100 was in if you like.)

4. Boot up and hope Windows likes the new card. It always worked for me.

I'm not trying to be hard on you. As you might be able to tell, I'm still fuming mad at Promise all these years later.

Good luck

Thank you all, and Merry Christmas!:-)  Right now I'm caught up in holiday season festivities and should find more time to respond to your replies later in the week.

I have considered your suggestions and chosen the following troubleshooting path....

-Try a smaller disk
-If that works I will consider using the larger disk capacity but replace the Promise controller

To start off I am taking Ghost4Me's suggestion to use the capacity limiting jumper on the 200gb disk.  I am doing this for two reasons.  First, because it doesn't cost anything.  And second, because Mustang suggested that my problem will be resolved if I either replace the controller or use a smaller disk.  I have already performed a low level format on the disk, installed the jumper, and restored all the partitions from Ghost backups.  The disk reports a capacity of 32gb now that the jumper is being used.  I have one question about this....

Is using the jumper guaranteed to emulate a smaller disk?  That is, is there any chance that the problem will not be resolved using the jumper, but would be resolved using another physical disk with a real maximum capacity of 32gb?

I also have a repeat question for Mustang.  As you booted from the 200gb disk using the Promise Ultra100 card, did the Promise BIOS report the disk's full size?

One last question for those of you who have restored your system and XP OS from Ghost backup images, and did so to a different hard disk.  This is about the blue progress bar on the XP boot screen, the screen that appears just before the logon screen.  After the restoration, have you ever noticed the blue worm making fewer passes through the progress bar than it did before?

I'm sorry for asking such a stupid question, but after living with this problem for so long that is one thing that all the failed restorations had in common.  And knowing it was normal behavior would sure put my mind at ease during the next 40 or 50 test boots.  Although I do not recall exactly how many passes it made before the disk failed, I do know it was more than one, and my other machine typically sees 5 to 7 passes.  The problem restorations, however, often never complete a single pass on boots where I do get the logon screen, of course when XP craps out I never get to the logon screen and the progress bar just keeps looping forever.  On this most recent restore, the worm gets about 3/4 way through the progress bar.  Normal or Not Normal?

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The disk reports a capacity of 32gb now that the jumper is being used.  I have one question about this.... Is using the jumper guaranteed to emulate a smaller disk?  That is, is there any chance that the problem will not be resolved using the jumper, but would be resolved using another physical disk with a real maximum capacity of 32gb?

I'm surprised that changing the jumper setting resulted in 32gb size.  I would have thought it would give you 120gb.

Are your sure your bios is set to auto detect or lba?  Maybe your pc bios for the hard drive has been manually set wrong.


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Is using the jumper guaranteed to emulate a smaller disk?  That is, is there any chance that the problem will not be resolved using the jumper, but would be resolved using another physical disk with a real maximum capacity of 32gb?

One thing to consider is that your newer Seagate contains an 8 mb or 16 mb buffer.  This is to improve throughput and response time.  I'm guessing that under heavier i/o loading is when the Promise card fails.  Maybe explains why it works for awhile.

Ghost4me


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I'm surprised that changing the jumper setting resulted in 32gb size.  I would have thought it would give you 120gb.

I can't speak to other brands, as I have only used Seagate HDD recently--but all of them from 40 GB through 160 GB's--the only size you can limit it to has been that *old* standard that goes back to the 32 GB HDD limit!

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I think I would take that as a very strong indication of where the problem lies!  Even though add-on hardware *says* its compatible or solves a 137 MB HDD limitation--there are so many systems out there with unique configurations and BIOS capabilities--there's just no way hardware, or software for that matter, can be made to function successfully with all those combinations--unless the maker is made aware of the problem(s), and their engineers solve the issue(s). The simple experiment to confirm this is to put say a 120 GB HDD on the system, and see if the problem still re-occurs!  Alternatively, get a different controller card and see if that helps.

NightOwl,

Yes, I totally agree.  It's too strong of an indicator to ignore.  However, I'm not just going on what the hardware *says*.  The following 3rd party utilities independently confirm it.  XP's Disk Mgmt reports all partitions as healthy, Partition Magic's utilities report no errors, Ghost's partition info utility reports no errors, and they all report the correct partition sizes.  As well, Seagate's diagnostics found nothing wrong, and it checks the motherboard, controller and disk partitions.  In fact, my thinking is as yours in that I already considered getting a smaller disk.  Already knowing the jumpered limit is only 32gb I thought I'd try using Seagate's "set disk size" utility to downsize the disk's capacity instead.  When I tried using it this was the message I got.....
"This command cannot be executed and is not necessary for this drive since it is attached to an additional controller".

In my last post I was hoping that 40 to 50 reboots would signal the end of my problem.  Unfortunately, when I got to the 5th reboot the problem started again:-(  Downsizing the 200gb to its jumpered 32gb size did not work.

I was curious, however, about what the XP OS might see with the jumpered 200gb.  Since nobody here could say whether using the jumper is guaranteed to emulate a 32gb physical disk, I ran Everest Home edition to see what it would report about it, and then compared the results to my other machine, which does have a physical (non-jumpered) 40gb disk.  Although Everest did report the disk's size as 32gb, it also reported that it DOES support 48-bit addressing and such; whereas the other machine reports that its 40gb disk does NOT support it.  In other words, aside from the reported size, it appears that the jumpered disk is still reporting its 200gb features.

Although I don't know a lot about those matters, it nags at me that a 32gb disk would report support for 48-bit addressing, if in fact 48-bit support isn't needed for disks under 137gb.  Anyway, there appears to be something unknown occurring now, that didn't occur before when XP (and the controller) was working fine with a physically smaller disk.  It's looking more and more like my next move would be to replace the disk, and after reading Ghost4Me's comments I think it would be prudent to limit its cache buffer to 2 mb to match the old disk.  I can get a Seagate 40gb w/2mb cache but am wondering if I should switch brands as well as sizes.  You have experience using Seagate disks, what do you think?


As an aside....
Prior to limiting the disk's capacity to 32gb, Ghost originally had a problem seeing the disk's full 200gb size.  I wasted a lot of time making more than a dozen restorations without a peep from Ghost - no alerts, no messages, nothing.  Then finally, on the next restore, in Ghost's "select a destination" dialog I noticed as I went to choose the first partition's destination that Ghost was offering me only 128gb of unallocated space on disk1.  It should have been 186.  Before that I was just choosing unallocated space on disk1 without actually making note of "how much" space Ghost was reporting in that dialog.  But that stopped when I started loading the updated Promise driver when booting Ghost from the CD.  After that it showed 186gb, the same size reported by the Promise BIOS at boot time.

Although Ghost9 says it supports the Ultra driver, apparently the version of the Ultra driver contained on the CD predates the driver that supports drives larger than 137gb.  I'm surprised Ghost wasn't smart enough to see it was loading its own Ultra 100 (non 48-bit driver) version for use with a large disk requiring the 48-bit driver.  In hindsight it seems Ghost doesn't look at the disk directly to evaluate its capacity, but rather looks at what its own outdated controller driver reports.  An alert would have been most helpful in that regard.  But even when I force Ghost to load the correct updated Ultra driver it complains about it, says I don't need to do it, and insists it already has the needed drivers.  It was this sort of behavior that prompted me to post here, to see what other quirks Ghost might have that I'm not aware of.


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I have a system that is happy to allow two IDE optical drives to be installed--but, if I attempt to install a third IDE optical drive, I get all sorts of aberrant behavior and error messages--for whatever reason, the BIOS will not allow more than two IDE optical drives!  I have a second system where I have three optical drives installed with no problems at all.

I'd give anything for an XP error message, or even a log file, but I've never received either.  XP just craps out without warning and without leaving a clue.  I too have a 2nd system, almost identical to this one.  That's another reason why I have to get to the bottom of this, I'll likely need to replace that disk some day too.

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Thanks for your detailed reply.  It's evident from this and the AumHA forum, you've tried a lot.

Ghost4Me,
I have tried to be as methodical as I can, but there are so many different things at play here, and no error messages to give me direction.  In and of itself that isn't so bad, but it takes so darn long to test things different ways given that I need to boot from Seagate's floppy to do a low level format, then wait for CDs to boot, restore the partitions, boot from other CDs to run checks & diagnostics, not to mention booting to XP countless times to see if it worked.  It can take 2 to 3 hours or more to test just one new idea.


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I'm glad to see that XP was never booted with both disks in the PC at the same time; that can cause gradual corruption. NightOwl and Mustang both gave excellent tips.  The reason I also mentioned removing the Promise IDE card was to eliminate it as a possibility.  You can probably change one of the Seagate jumpers to restrict the drive size to less than 137 gb if you want to test that.

As mentioned in my reply to NightOwl, I have tried the jumper but it didn't work.


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Just the fact that Promise card is seeing a newer technology hard drive, and especially one that is faster and has different timing for i/o to and from your motherboard to the drive, could explain that theory.  Wonder how cheap a newer 133 Promise card would be?  Probably not very costly.

True, not very costly.  But being on a fixed income I can't afford to start throwing money at this problem unless there's a very good indication it will pay off.

By the way, my old disk wasn't 40gb, it was 30gb.  I have a 40gb in my other machine and sometimes confuse the two.  What do you think about me getting a 40gb Seagate, would you switch brands as well?  The old one was a Maxtor, which I don't want, it went bad after only 14 months.


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Glad to see you have a good save Ghost image backup(s).  If/when you try again, I would avoid manipulating the partitions with Partition Magic until much later, like after it is working for several weeks.  You don't want to introduce another variable. As an aside, what model HP printer do you have and what are you trying to print with it?  You should be able to get that to work under XP.

I agree with you about not wanting to introduce more variables.  The printer is an HP PSC380.  I can use it under XP, I just can't clean print heads or perform other maintenance that is run from the printer's software.  And as I said, HP has chosen not to supply XP software for that printer.


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Finally, I would be careful about trying an XP repair install on your 200gb system.  I haven't ever heard of anyone that has a d: system drive doing that.  I'm worried that the repair install may set xp back to c: which you don't want.  (I could be wrong on this point, but just be careful).

Thanks for your concern.  I already ran a XP repair install.  And though it failed to fix the problem, it did drop me off at the logon screen where I commenced letting XP detect the new hardware.  It didn't do anything to the partition structure as far as I can tell.  I've also run a repair install about a year ago, for a different problem, and it handled the partition structure without a problem.  If I'm not mistaken, you can choose to have XP set up your drives this way during installation.


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One thing to consider is that your newer Seagate contains an 8 mb or 16 mb buffer.  This is to improve throughput and response time.  I'm guessing that under heavier i/o loading is when the Promise card fails.  Maybe explains why it works for awhile.

The old one had a 2mb cache buffer, the new one is 8mb.  Both 7200rpm.

If the Promise card is what's failing, wouldn't it fail in Windows 98SE as well?  Especially since 48-bit addressing shouldn't be an issue in either OS now that the 32gb jumper was used.  W98 always works, even when XP craps out.  In fact, before I recently decided to start from scratch by performing a low level format each time, I was restoring just the D: partition to get XP running again.  I must have restored XP's partition that way nearly 2 dozen times and all the while W98 continued to work as if nothing ever happened.

Help_Seeker

Well, you may be *looking* at the actual problem but not *seeing* it--Mustang has said he had experience with this problem, and if I followed--it was a compatibility issue between the controller and HDD--the OS, per se, had nothing to do with the issue.

WinXP is constantly accessing the HDD while Win98 does not.  WinXP may be using access and I/O's that are different than how Win98 utilizes the HDD and its controller--which might explain why WinXP only has the problem.

As you have stated, the jumper only limits the HDD size, but it does not change the *nature* of the large HDD--the timings, etc. remain the same--so if the controller is the problem, as Mustang suggested--then you still have the variable that has remained constant--just as the problem has!

I doubt its a HDD *brand* problem as much as a HDD communication *standard* that is probably causing some sort of *glitch*.  

I understand you are trying to avoid spending more $, but unless you try a different HDD controller, and/or a different HDD with perhaps reduced operational specs, i.e. smaller size, smaller cache, and/or slower spindle speed,--you are not finding out if the root cause is what Mustang suggested.  Maybe you could get the newer controller card from a source that will let you return it if it proves not to solve the problem--i.e. is not compatible with your system!

If you want to try a different PCI IDE drive controller, then eBay is a good place to look for bargains.

Here's one Belkin example for $9.00.

Quote:

WinXP is constantly accessing the HDD while Win98 does not.  WinXP may be using access and I/O's that are different than how Win98 utilizes the HDD and its controller--which might explain why WinXP only has the problem.

NightOwl,

Exactly, but with the same controller there was no problem with XP when it was used with the smaller 30gb disk.


Quote:

I understand you are trying to avoid spending more $, but unless you try a different HDD controller, and/or a different HDD with perhaps reduced operational specs, i.e. smaller size, smaller cache, and/or slower spindle speed,--you are not finding out if the root cause is what Mustang suggested.  Maybe you could get the newer controller card from a source that will let you return it if it proves not to solve the problem--i.e. is not compatible with your system!

Remember though, the root of the problem has to be the replacement disk.  My intention was to get the machine running reliably, not to upgrade to a larger (200gb) disk.  I purchased the 200gb only because is was less expensive than any of the smaller drives at the time I bought it, not because I needed 170gb of new disk space.  However, at that time I had no idea what I would be in for regarding large disk support.  In fact, I thought I had the needed support from the Promise Ultra100 or I wouldn't have purchased the disk.  But as it turned out the combination of the Promise Ultra100 and the 200gb does have problems; whereas the combination of the same controller with the 30gb disk didn't have problems.  That's why I say the 200gb disk is the root of the problem.  The controller would only be a problem if I needed the 170gb of extra disk space, but that isn't the case.

My intention right now is to replace the hard disk while keeping the specs as close as possible to the former hard disk.

proposed new disk - Seagate 40gb, 2mb cache, 7200rpm
former disk - Maxtor 30gb, 2mb cache, 7200rpm
problem disk - Seagate 200gb jumpered to 32gb, 8mb cache, 7200rpm


Quote:

As you have stated, the jumper only limits the HDD size, but it does not change the *nature* of the large HDD--the timings, etc. remain the same--so if the controller is the problem, as Mustang suggested--then you still have the variable that has remained constant--just as the problem has!

I see the controller being the issue with the 200gb disk for the same reasons you listed.  They are the ONLY THINGS that changed in the machine's configuration once the size of the disk (one variable) was eliminated with the jumper.  But I don't see the controller being an issue with a smaller drive, as long as the drive possesses, as you say, the *nature* of the small 30gb HDD I used to have in the machine.

Mustang suggested that I either replace the controller *or* the hard disk (with a smaller one).  I am approaching this from the hard disk side of his suggestion first, for several reasons.  1st, except for 10gb, the proposed disk's specs are virtually identical to the old drive.  That's practically zero variables.  2nd, although #1 should work, I still have the controller to turn to as a last resort.  3rd, I already have a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 in my other machine, but have issues with it when creating backup images with Ghost, issues=equal=variables and I don't want to introduce any more than I already have.

I also don't want to fiddle around with the controller inside my only working machine, because having the extra 178gb of disk space isn't important enough for me to risk the added aggravation of having both pc's down.  And since the highest likelihood for success is putting in a small disk just like the one that used to work, why bother futzing with the controller at all at this point in time.  Furthermore, the 200gb disk wouldn't go to waste gathering dust.  It could possibly be used in my other machine, the one that already has a Promise 133 TX2, but that's something for another day, first things first.  I hope you can see why I'm reluctant to work with the controller first.  That is, the aggravation and/or cost may never be necessary should the smaller drive pan out, and the large drive could still be put to use elsewhere.

For what it's worth, I was about to post here last month about the Ghost issue with the 133 TX2 but then I got sidetracked with the problem I have now.  Perhaps I'll start a new thread about that later, but in the meantime if you know of any good threads about "ultra" warnings appearing in XP's System Event Viewer, but ONLY while creating Ghost images from XP, I'd appreciate you pointing me to them.  I get 62 of those warnings every time I make backups with Ghost, that's the only time I see them.

Now please don't mistake that machine for the one I'm having the more serious problems with, I have NEVER had any Ultra warnings from the Ultra 100 controller.


Quote:

I doubt its a HDD *brand* problem as much as a HDD communication *standard* that is probably causing some sort of *glitch*.

I doubt it's a brand name issue too, but thought I'd ask.  Thanks for reinforcing my suspicions.  I think the proposed Seagate disk matches the old disk's specs well enough to give it a shot.  What do you think?

Help_Seeker wrote on Dec 29^th, 2006 at 4:46pm:

Exactly, but with the same controller there was no problem with XP when it was used with the smaller 30gb disk. Remember though, the root of the problem has to be the replacement disk.

I hope your proposed new disk solves the problem.  I'm not too optimistic, but always hopeful.

My main concern is that, as you probably know, disk drives have changed considerably over the last few years.  A 200 or 40 gb drive is not the same as a 30 gb drive from 5 years ago.  Even the same model might not perform with the same speed and timing.  

The simple reason is that the i/o modes (PIO) of disk drives have evolved, allowing faster speeds and interfaces.  That is why a given controller (like the Promise) can work differently or give erratic results with different drives.

Here's some gory details about different PIO modes.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/modesPIO-c.html

Motherboard bios's are supposed to detect the PIO mode of the drive and controller and you can manually set most motherboards if they don't.

All this adds up to reasons that a PC today and a hard drive today are just not interchangeable.  They are usually downward compatible, but not always.

Personally I don't think Windows 98 ever drove your hard drive to the level of activity that XP does.  No fault of either 98 or XP, but they are completely different.  That's why there are different drivers for each one.  Just because Promise works with the Windows 98 drivers, doesn't guarantee it will work with XP under all loading.

My approach would still be the $9 for the Belkin card, but I understand your hesitancy to do that.

Just a followup to let you all know the problem has been resolved.  It was not a hardware issue, nor was it entirely a Ghost issue.  However, Ghost did drop the ball when it came to restoring the MBR as well as the boot.ini file.

As it turned out, Ghost changed the ARC path in the boot.ini file on every restoration.  In my opinion, Ghost has no place doing that.  Restore a file, yes; but altering its content is simply not acceptable.  As well, Ghost did not restore the MBR in a manner that allowed Boot Magic to work as it had on the original disk.  While these are additional issues, they were not in and of themselves responsible for the looping progress bar problem.

At the end of the day, what ended up fixing the looping progress bar problem was a defragmentation of both the WXPBOOT partition (which contains XP's boot files), and the WXP partition (which contains XP's OS files).  The defrag operation was performed on the copied version of the partitions, not the partitions on the original disk.  On the original disk XP reported that none of the partitions needed to be defragmented.

These discoveries came about as a result of performing two copy operations from the original hard disk (not performing "restore" operations from backed up image files as had previously been done).  The first copy, using Ghost.  The second, using BING.  Details can be found in this page of my thread at AumHa forums.  Please page down to my post dated 1/4/07 where I continued troubleshooting since last posting here, and referenced this Radified forum thread.

The 200gb disk was put to use as a secondary removable hard disk used for storing backup image files, as well as image (picture) files, and sound files.  It is working fine with the Promise Ultra 100 controller.

I have since transitioned this machine from Ghost to BING, and am doing the same with my other machine.  Given the alarming revelation that Ghost altered the content of at least one restored file, and given the fact that Ghost fell flat on its face restoring the MBR (which by the way was created by another Symantec product, Partition Magic), I no longer have faith in Ghost nor Symantec.

While I have many other reasons to migrate from these two Symantec programs, particularly Ghost, economics is one I couldn't overlook.  With MS Vista looming on the horizon I would likely be looking forward to upgrading Ghost 9 in order to gain Vista support, that would be at least $50 paid to Symantec.  And given that I needed to upgrade to Partition Magic 8 to gain XP support, that's a second Symantec program I would likely have to upgrade as well... another $50.  I have never known Symantec to offer free major upgrades meant to support new MS OS's.  BootIt Next Generation (BING) can do for me what both of those programs do, and it costs only $35, and it's already Vista compatible.  But what I like most about it is that it's completely OS independent.  Unlike Ghost 9, backups can be performed by either running the backup program at boot time from the hard disk, or booting from a floppy disk.

I didn't buy Ghost because of its hot imaging capability, but rather had to contend with it for what I thought would be a clear and simple means to create and restore backup images.  I've never used my pc while imaging is in progress, I'm simply not in that much of a rush to risk compromising the integrity of my backups.  However, I can appreciate why others may have a need for such features.  But for me at least, Ghost's advanced imaging features seemed to unbearably complicate its ability to perform simple restorations.  Not to mention altering file content, and the apparent lack of support for a MBR created by another Symantec program.  In my opinion, Symantec's left hand (Ghost) should at least know what its right hand (Partition Magic/Boot Magic) is doing, especially when both programs are installed on the same computer but lack the handshaking necessary to have Ghost perform an uneventful restoration.