Hi,

After following the excellent tutorial about a bootable ghost cd
I am recieving the following error when I start ghost.exe:

NTFS signature, should not be FAT32

What could cause this problem?

I have the following configuration:

- Laptop with no floppy drive (hence the boot cd)
- 1 Disk 100Gb
- 2 Partitions both NTFS, 1st partition has Windows XP installed

After some googling, I did found some information which indicates that maybe my
master boot record contains some inconsistant information about my drive.

There where 3 possible solutions:
- Running Fdisk with the /mbr option
- Running the XP recovery tool with the /fixmbr option
- Running MBRWiz /Repair=1 (see www.mbrwizard.com)

But i'm afraid that these options might kill my XP installation.
And thats what i'm trying to backup, not destroy :-)

Or maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction and it has nothing to do with the
MBR?

Any help is appreciated,
Thank you,

Mathijs

wrote on Jan 23^rd, 2008 at 4:02am:

What could cause this problem?

There isn't any one single cause; unfortunately it's a really badly-written error message, but it actually comes from the FAT filesystem code which is complaining that what it's looking at seems to be NTFS rather than FAT.

Why it gets into trying the FAT filesystem code depends on a lot of other factors; it could be because the MBR has the wrong code for the partition (which is type 7 for NTFS), or it could be because it's a type 7 partition but it already tried mounting it as NTFS and it decided it probably wasn't. Or maybe something else, it's hard to tell.

It's impossible to say which situation applies without seeing dumps of the MBR and of the first sector of the NTFS partitions, and of course Ghost 2003 is now pretty long in the tooth and the newer versions of the code have had all this changed around since then (largely as a result of Dell hidden utility partitions moving from FAT to NTFS, which confused the filesystem identification picture some more).

I've personally never seen this error, it's pretty rare, and the few cases that were ever actually reported to us it tended to be difficult to get the dumps of the relevant sectors or discover what lead to them being the way they were, so it's hard to give any solid advice on working around it. Using something like MBRWizard seems reasonably as a first attempt though, and although I've never had any cause to use it some other folks here speak about it positively and I'd say it's the best bet of the three options you present.

Hi Nigel,

Thank you for your response!
Yesterday I took the risk of running MBRWizard and it worked!
It left my XP installation intact. It did reload some devices when I restarted,
but it worked!

Now ghost start as excpected. I also made an image of my first partition without
any problems.

I/m not sure what caused this problem, but maybe it had to do with the way XP
got installed on my laptop.

The laptop originally came with Vista, but our system administrators downgraded it
with a XP image (as al laptops have in our company).
Maybe that caused the problem.

Thanks,
Mathijs

wrote on Jan 24^th, 2008 at 12:55am:

The laptop originally came with Vista, but our system administrators downgraded it with a XP image (as al laptops have in our company). Maybe that caused the problem.

It's very possible, your corporate admins are likely to use some kind of special deployment tools like the corporate version of Ghost, Altiris RapidDeploy or perhaps something else. So, perhaps something about the process they used has lead to this.

Whatever tools they use, this is a good chance to narrow down the process that leads to this happening - and that's actually the most important thing we need to learn to get the underlying problem fixed. Since the problem is so rare, it's not something our QA folks are going to come across with their testing so would be nice to learn more.

So if you don't mind asking them how they deployed your laptop it'd be useful information. Lots of company IT folks are sensitive about this kind of thing, so if they want it to be private, it can be arranged.

Mathijs,

Is your laptop an Asus brand?