Ok, here is the situation. I had SATA drive. I created bootable floppy with NG2003. It starts ghost with -NOIDE parameter. Everything worked just fine, until a added anothe IDE harddrive. Starting from that point I always get a NG blue window, when it throws me out to DOS prompt with error message "divide overflow". I assumed that NG2003 doesn't support both IDE and SATA, so I disabled IDE in BIOS and tried again. Now, it just hangs. I get NG blue window with hourglass and no response.

Anyone knows what the problem is? Thanks.  :'(

Have you tried without switches? I have created Images from SATA to PATA and restored the other way several times without any switches (other than "-split=650" and "-auto" to fit on CD's). I have also cloned disk-to-disk from SATA to PATA without any switches.

Edited: I forgot to mention that I always do the deed booted from Ghost floppies.

Christer

In 11 years of running Ghost in one version or another, I've NEVER used any switches.
To treat a SATA drive like an IDE drive is usually done in the Bios, not with Ghost itself.

The only time I've ever seen Ghost hang is when Ghost 2003, Build 753, first encountered an AM2 motherboard.  It couldn't read the drives thru that mobo, so after the copyright screen, it would just hang....like forever.
Upgrading Ghost 2003 to Build 793 took care of that problem.

I always run Ghost 2003 from a DOS boot floppy, totally bypassing Windows and any problems that may bring.
Ghost 2003 has not been installed on any PC of mine for more years than I can remember.

Ghost 8.3 and Ghost 11.5 are both run from a Boot Flash Drive or bootable CD.

Good Luck,
Shadow  8-)

Christer wrote on Jan 8^th, 2009 at 6:15pm:

Have you tried without switches? I have created Images from SATA to PATA and restored the other way several times without any switches (other than "-split=650" and "-auto" to fit on CD's). I have also cloned disk-to-disk from SATA to PATA without any switches. Edited: I forgot to mention that I always do the deed booted from Ghost floppies. Christer

Hello Christer and all on this wonderful board.
Before deciding to post I have browsed the pages of the forum to try and find a solution to my problem.

I have been using NG2003 (build 793) for some time to make images of personal PCs in a small home network. All PCs except one can be imaged to a NAS device (LaCie Big Disk) on which I have defined a network share. The device acts as an NT (v 4.9 server) and offers compatibility with Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, XP clients.

I start NG2003 from a DOS (win98se formatted floppy) that loads the usual network drivers. So far this is OK evidenced by the PC being pingable. The NAS network share is visible and accessible Read and Write commands OK.

When I start NG2003 from the command line either from a floppy or the network share (mapped drive) where there is a copy of ghost.exe, I see local drives&partitions (sources I want to image) and I can select the mapped drive as destination. After the usual popups the main screen appears but nothing happens after I see "Adding MFT..." after a while I get Error 29089 Error writing image file. A ghosterr file is created only when I use the ghost floppy.

First I suspected the config of the NAS device share but had to exclude it since other PCs can be imaged fine (using same logon creds).

I am now suspect the culprit PC HW config since it differs from others as having 1 SATA drive and 1 PATA drive hooked on a ASRock 939N68PV-GLAN mobo. As often the BIOS settings are numerous and I am relunctant to play with them without guidance.

To try to workaround the problem I have tried the -fni switch (in ghost.ini file) but this produces the same error. I have read the posts of NightOwl, TheShadow and other experts on this forum that testify NG2003 CAN handle SATA+PATA configs.

Do you think -fna or -fnu could make this work ?
Maybe someone could help me changing settings in BIOS (I can supply screenshots of the relevant sections) ?

This has been driving me nuts for quite a while so I'd appreciate the help you can kindly provide.

Regards ;)