Need some help.  I have copy of Ghost 9.0 and used the copy wizard screen to copy/clone my SCSI 36GB 10,000 RPM single partition Seagate onto a 36GB 15,000RPM HD. Checked "set drive active"  I moved ~12GB into the new HD and everything went OK.   Pulled out the source drive re-set everything to boot from it, and it goes fine for a while.  I get the normal screen that you get waiting for Xp to open, but it then after a pause which it looks like it is about to begin, it goes into a screen that says loading your personal files and then immediately switches into-- Windows is saving your files and says it is shutting down.  It then hangs at that point.

I have done & Re-done this 5-6 times.  I formated the new drive into one primary partition (same as source)  tried everything I know.  Tried to go into safe mode but won't do that.   Tried several times checking & unchecking the copy MBR but it won't get out of this mode.  Got out the Xp installation disk and tried the repair/recovery  activities but could not get them to work.

I don't have a very complex hard drive/partition situation so I'm puzeled on why it won't continue into the desktop and start?  My mouse works while this all is happening.  Its the only thing that responds.

I have read the FAQ's and have done a search but never seen a computer behave in this manner.
I'd like to use the faster hard drive and my first experience with Norton Ghost 9.0 is not a happy one. Any suggestions?

Have you seen this?

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1117581957

taderbush,

It's not entirely typical but it sounds like you have drive letter problems. This occurs with Ghost 9 if you copy into a partition. The new OS doesn't see itself as C: drive. I see you are copying into a partition now but was the first copy into a partition as well?

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1117581957

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1148252120

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm#method3

I'd delete all partitions on your new HD and then follow the Ghost 9 instructions above. It should work. Or you could try the Method #3 technique. That will be a lot quicker.

I had a very similar problem on an XP restore. I had to do the restore from the ghost boot CD. The "restore mbr" was greyed out when I tried any other method.

Make sure that you have SCSI drivers available to do an F6 floppy load if you need them. I have no idea if the ghost boot CD installs SCSI drivers by default or by sensing them or by user direction only. I do know that RAID drivers require user loading; RAID shows as SCSI in the oem text file.

The F6 window goes by pretty fast; while the plaintext progress bar is going across. So, you have to be alert. I found that the hard way. :(

Good luck,

Dave

taderbush wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2007 at 9:42pm:

"... Need some help..."

taderbush -

I thank yew haf cum tu tha rite plase for sum halp, sho' 'nuff [smiley=thumbsup.gif]

Old_Peskie

Yea, I did read the link. Did not find any clues to my issue.  Perhaps I'm not smart enough or just blind.

I also thought I followed the instructions "perfectly" on Ghost 9 steps.  I have only one partition on both drives. I try to follow the KIIS formula.  I formatted it into one primary partition just before I copied the contents onto the HD.
When I looked, I had two active drives C: and I: according to Ghost.  I would assume Xp would re-assign the drive letter back to C: when I pulled the original HD out.  The SCSI does not really assign letters but gives numbered letters an in this instance, it is configured as drive "0".  

If it was confused about the drive letter(s) I would not think it would get as far in the booting process as it does.  It is "almost" ready to give me the Desktop, (I can hear it loads the audio card clicking) and then it jumps immediately into the mode where it tries to shut down with the messages (Loading your files and then saving your settings) flashed and displayed.  Then it just hangs silently  for about 3 minutes and you then get a loop of windows shutdown wav sound.

If it were a drive letter assignment issue, I'd think you would never get that far into the booting process?  

Still baffled.

I'm still not clear that you copied into Unallocated Space. You mentioned.


Quote:

I formatted it into one primary partition just before I copied the contents onto the HD.

You also mentioned..


Quote:

I had two active drives C: and I: according to Ghost.

If you saw that then when you swap drives the new HD won't boot.

Are you sure you followed the instructions?

I agree that your WinXP is rebooting late. It usually reboots at the Welcome Screen stage. Humour me. Try Method #3.

Brian,
I don't see where method #3 applies. It, by my reading, refers to when you have had multiple partitions on a single drive.  Not my case.  I copied the entire contents of C: (36GB) drive (one partition only) into the one  partition formatted active primary drive of 36GB.  Both drives have never had more than one partition.
If it were a C: vs I: drive recognition problem, I can't see where the mouse would work, the sound card spits out "goodby"  into my speakers.  It in my mind,  it would give me an error that it can't find OS or give a boot error message.

 If it was unallocated, I presume you can't use it? Means it is not formatted?  I think I allocated it space to one ~36GB active partition.

How can I stop the action of the shutting down midstream?  Then I might be able to fix it.

taderbush


Quote:

It, by my reading, refers to when you have had multiple partitions on a single drive.

You probably need to read a little more carefully!  It's not so much that the HDD has more than one partition, but that the system has more than one partition present--each being assigned a drive letter and remembered in the Registry!

What you have not yet understood is how WinXP assigns and remembers drive letter assignments.

Drive letters are remembered in the Registry--it's based on recognizing a HDD based on it's *NT-signature* that's recorded in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the first absolute sector of each HDD.

If your *new, cloned* HDD has already been formatted, then your WinXP Registry already *knows* that it's drive letter is *I*, no matter what you have copied to that HDD--but the various other Registry calls during boot are looking for the HDD that it knows to be drive letter *C:\*--but that HDD is no where to be found if you have removed it from the system--when WinXP checks to see what partitions are to be found on the system--C:\ as defined in the Registry by its *NT-signature* is not present--so each system call that says *load program xyz from drive C:\* fails--because only the partition known by the Registry to be present is *drive I:\*!

Out of curiosity, is your mouse USB?--is it being supported by the BIOS in the early boot phase, as opposed to being available because Windows has already loaded the mouse support?  Sound card--who knows....I'd have to know more about your actual system setup to understand better--and even then I may very well still not understand....


Quote:

If it was unallocated, I presume you can't use it?

Ghost has the uncanny ability to *see* available unallocated space to perform its wizardry upon!

Humor the *Brian*!

I feel confident I'll be humoured. Or humored if I was in a different country.

Brain

G'day Mate!  I was unaware of that difference!  I glossed over the spelling in your post without it even registering!

Is the pronunciation more the *our* or *or* sound--or the *mer* sound suggested in the dictionary pronunciation key?

Dictionary.com--Humour

Dictionary.com--9 results for: -or

NightOwl, I think it's pronounced the same in Australia as in the US. The final "our" tends to be a slur of "mer" and "or". We follow the British spelling but I think US spelling is more sensible although it is not becoming more commonplace here. Which do you prefer, oesophagus or esophagus. Probably neither.

Despite our spelling differences, accents aside, pronunciations are usually the same.

I meant to post this information earlier. If you don't have a floppy drive to run fdisk /mbr then you can clear the DiskID with a boot CD. There are several ways to do this but the easiest is to use a free download from Acronis. The file is called "mbrautowrite_en.iso". It contains fxdisk.

http://www.acronis.com/files/support/mbrautowrite_en.iso

Download the .ISO and burn it (as an image, not as data) to a CD.
Boot to the CD
You will see "press any key to rewrite MBR"   followed by a flashing cursor
After you press a key there are a few more lines of text finishing with
Press <Enter> to reboot...
Remove the CD before you press Enter

I've tried this CD and it does the same things as fdisk /mbr. Rewrites boot code and clears the DiskID.



"Clear Sig" from BING, clears the DiskID without rewriting boot code. Convenient if you have a BING CD.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

Brian wrote on Apr 4^th, 2007 at 3:39pm:

"Clear Sig" from BING, clears the DiskID without rewriting boot code. Convenient if you have a BING CD. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

I couldn't find "Clear Sig" on their website.  Do you have to purchase the full package or is it available separtely?

John, Clear Sig is part of BING. There is a 4 week trial period. BING is one of the smartest apps that I've used. Partitioning, Boot Manager, Image/Restore, edit boot.ini, MBR backup etc, etc.


Quote:

What You Can Do With BootIt Next Generation (BING) While you can read a detailed description of each BootIt NG feature in Using BootIt NG on page 14, the following is a brief overview of just some of the many tasks you can accomplish using BootIt NG: • Create over 200 primary partitions (if desired). • Configure detailed boot items to fit your needs. • Boot from any partition or volume on up to eight hard drives. • Boot multiple operating systems from a single file allocation table (FAT) or FAT32 partition. • Logically swap the boot hard drive to look like the first. • Logically swap floppy disk drives. • Boot from drive A or B on the fly. • Resize FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file system partitions without data loss. • Convert between FAT and FAT32 without data loss. • Format FAT or FAT32 partitions or volumes. • Create volumes in extended partitions. • Set up users and passwords. • Create compressed images of your partitions (includes USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 support).

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=178

Hey taderbush,

Any news for us? We are very interested in your outcome. Others with a similar problem will benefit.

Sorry, I gave up trying to work thru the problem.  Thanks for the effort.  Will have to try something else.  The solutions just were not relevent to my problem.  Can't understand how such a simple process (yea, I know it is very complex) can result in such difficulties.  Norton Ghost should work better as I really had the classic set-up and configuration that Ghost was designed for.  I try to keep things simple to avoid situations such as I encountered.   Fooling with the MBR  each time someone performs a simple HD to HD Clone makes the Ghost unusable for 90% of the people.

Suspect it is a Win Xp issue triggered by the cloning.

I'll trash Ghost and find something else.

So fdisk /mbr didn't work?

:-[  Well  guess what....... Most embarassing, It did fix the problem.  [blush, blush bright red] I finally found the old '98 Win boot disk and tried it booting to the floppy and it took right off after I used the command A: fdisk/mbr and re-booted to the new drive.

I formatted and updated the new drive as it has been some time, so  with no changes, the drive this time was  assigned  the letter "G" prior to cloning.

I have learned a lesson.  Listen to the experts.   I'm now using the new 15K drive.    I'll swap back and forth occasionally as a back-up.

Ghost has an issue there to try to fix as I can't imagine too many other folks going to this length to get it working.  

Thanks again for the help.  I was being a block head.  

Humbly Yours,

Taderbush

taderbush


Quote:

Well  guess what....... Most embarassing, It did fix the problem.  [blush, blush bright red]

Trust me--most of us have been there at least once--if not more times--learning how to use Ghost--glad you have resolved the problem.


Quote:

I feel confident I'll be humoured.

The *Brian* has been *humoured*  :D !

taderbush,

Great news. I'm pleased you are up and running.

It happened to me a few months ago while helping a friend upgrade to a larger laptop HD. I used images rather than a clone and I was surprised when the OS kept rebooting after entering a username and password at the Welcome Screen. I had done all those tests in the past with Ghost cloning but the drive letter issue after an image /restore surprised me. I was using Drive Snapshot for the image /restore and now I can't remember what I did wrong.

I hope you keep using Ghost 9. I'm very satisfied with its performance.

taderbush wrote on Apr 7^th, 2007 at 6:27pm:

Ghost has an issue there to try to fix as I can't imagine too many other folks going to this length to get it working.

It's not a Ghost issue. It's a WinXP issue.


From Dan Goodell


Quote:

Here's another example of a common cloning mistake: suppose XP-1 is C: on disk-1, and F: is a partition on disk-2. Then XP-1 is subsequently cloned to XP-2 on disk-2, and disk-1 is removed. Again, XP-2 will recognize its partition was previously given a drive letter and will keep it. The boot process may hang (usually at the login or blue "Welcome" screen) while XP-2 searches in vain for "drive C:".

Quote:

do not let old-XP see the new partition before cloning. Doing so would give XP a chance to assign a drive letter, it will be remembered by the registry when it is cloned, and the clone will adopt the wrong drive letter for itself.

The solution is to clone into Unallocated Space. It works first time, every time.



taderbush,

How are you finding the "speed" of that 15000 rpm HD? Is it subjectively faster than the 10000 rpm? I haven't used HDs like these.

The 15K SCSI HD is nice.  But it is noticably faster  over the 10K machine which is also quite speedy.  Where it would have a "wow" factor I think would be over a 7200 RPM IDE drive.   I only paid $25 for it new at a swap meet. Which is cheaper than the Ghost program.  Everyone thinks they need a 200+GB HD and that is making some of these older SCSI fast HD's pretty cheap. I'm worried about reliability of these fast machines however, as I have had two 10K HD's crap out.  :(  I have a fan attached to it so I hope it lasts.
Now I better get a new motherboard and really fast CPU.  I'm running an ASUS A8V MB and a 3500 AMD 64 bit CPU.

Again thanks for the help and advice.

Bill

Bill, how about the HD noise? Is it much different from a 7200 rpm HD?

The 15K Seagate HD is actually quite quiet. Nothing objectionable.  I hear more noise in the fans (six of them) than the HD.  Very nice and quiet HD.   The SCSI interface sometimes is a pain to administer.  Think SCSI is going away with the new RAID set-ups.