Thank you odeen! The MBRTool fix worked perfectly. Thank goodness I found this thread.

I noticed that the drive I cloned to had a slightly diferent partition structure than the drive with the original windows installation (the original had two primary partitions, and the active partition was the second of these- this is the stupid Gateway "restore partition" configuration. The new drive had a primary and extended partition, and the active was the first of the two). Just for kicks, I tried the process again from the beginning but this time formatting the new drive with exactly the same partition structure as the source drive. This time it was not necessary to use the MBRTool fix. Perhaps a small difference in the drive partitioning as compared to some stored parameter in XP is what causes the volume bytes problem in the copied XP installation, rather than an inherent problem with Ghost 9.0?? Is that a possibility?

What odeen is calling the "volume bytes" are really the "NT Serial Number", or today more commonly called simply the "Disk ID".  ("Volume" would be the wrong term--volumes are subdivisions of a partition, and the MBR is part of neither a partition nor a volume.)  As NightOwl alluded to earlier in this thread, the Disk ID is explained in detail on my webpage at www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm.  What you are doing manually with mbrtool is the same thing "Kawecki's Trick" does.

Any Windows-based cloner like Ghost 9 has to manipulate the DiskID and/or the drive letter assignments stored in the registry's [MountedDevices] key.  That's just part of the extra complexity demanded when working "from-the-inside" that we've argued about earlier in this thread.  "From-the-outside" cloners don't have that kind of trouble.  But I don't know why v9 didn't handle it correctly in your first instance.



If that is indeed the cause, I would say that's by definition an "inherent problem" with the product.  I'm not sure that's the case, but it would be interesting if you could test-clone a few more times and see if you could find a pattern to the problem.

I figured this was a good place to ask this question because I to am having the same problem. I am trying to restore Windows XP pro sp v.2149. Let me explain what I have first and trying to accomplish. I have 2 hard drives in my computer. One at 15 gig (C:) (no partitions) and the other at 120 gig ( D:, E:, F:, etc) divided into 25 gig partitions each. I ran ghost 2003 in DOS and did an image of C: using the PARTITION option. I placed that image on E: of the second hard drive. I then went to restore it on D: which went fine I also did an integrity check before restoring. I then open my computer and disconnected all cables from C: (15 gig) in hopes of having my second hard drive get bumped to C: in booting up. I turn the computer on and waiting for it to boot to my dismay I got stuck at the login screen with nothing happening, not even no hard drive action from the LED.
My question is I figure it may be the MBR as what I read from this thread. But I do not want to chance messing with the MBR on that drive due to all other important information I have on the other partitions of that drive. Will messing with the MBR mess up the other partitions and will I be able to restore from this drive without having to reinstall Windows XP again? I know I am on the right track but as for windows not booting I am lost when it comes to using the MBR.  I do have a small DOS  program called restorembr.exe. I assume its for DOS but not sure how to use it or if its able to help me with what I am trying to attain. If anyone can give me some type of info that what went wrong with my restore it would be greatly appreciated. Thank You

I like to thank you NightOwl for you quick response and effective information. My problem was solved. What I did, was use method 2 in the kawecki trick link you gave me. I first went into the registry deleted all the keys. I then shut down booted in DOS using 98 se boot disk then ran ghost. Did an image then check the integrity of the image and then uncompressed the image to the first partition on my second HDD D:. I then shut down disconnected my first HDD and booted up my second HDD now becoming C: for the first time it booted up and worked well, an exact image of my windows XP was created. Once again thank you NightOwl, for your corrective reply to my problem.

Thank you MadMan for bringing up an interesting issue and thank you NightOwl for providing such an insightful link as 'Kawecki's Tricks'.

But after going through the  posts made by MadMan, I could not resist asking - "Why did you not use 'Method 3' instead of 'Method 2' as the former could have got you there quickly without the need for creating the image again when you had already restored an image to Partition D: of Disk 2 ?" The only thing that was left to be done was to reassign the Partition D: as C:/ using 'fixmbr' command.

I ask this just to know if there was a faster solution to the above problem and apologise if I missed anything technical. An answer to this post will certainly provide more insights into the issue.

- Frodo

i have ghost 2002 and everything seems to point towards a need for a floppy disk.  Do I need a floppy disk to make a clone?  Many thanks

For however many successful DOS-based restores that can be documented, I suspect that it could be matched by an equally large number of Window-based restores (although, admittedly, no such dataset exists).  As a consequence, such comparisons do not help resolve the question of whether Windows-based imaging is more or less reliable than DOS-based imaging