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	Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops Reply #15 - Oct 10^th, 2005 at 6:53pm Dan Goodell Okay, so the disk geometries don't match--but why will the system boot successfully if an emergency WinXP floppy boot disk is used? Does the mis-matched geometry only effect where the system looks for the files used for booting that's on the floppy?
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crbell

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Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops
Reply #16 - Oct 10^th, 2005 at 6:54pm

That is absolutely amazing. There is no way I would have figured that out on my own. HP couldn't help me, symantec coulden't either. See how much trial & error & experience counts?

I will see if my boss will purchase a USB hard drive and we'll give that a shot.

One more question though...
If I do a disk to disk, from laptop to usb, then usb to laptop and laptop and laptop (and so on), could I then do it from usb to desktop hard drive (for storage purposes)? Then later when I get more identical laptops or have to reimage the ones I have now, I would have to go desktop hard drive to usb drive, then usb drive to laptop? Yes? I'm asking because we almost always have a spare imaged hard disk for each model machine we have. I don't think we'll get more than 1 or 2 USB drives. I hope this makes sense!

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	Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops Reply #17 - Oct 10^th, 2005 at 6:59pm crbell Create whole driveimages of the HDD's, not disk-to-disk clones--the image will restore the HDD just fine, just as if it was disk-to-disk, only now it's image-to-disk. As long as your labtop and external USB HDD recognize each other, you should be fine.
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	Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops Reply #18 - Oct 10^th, 2005 at 7:03pm I see what you are saying, that way I can save more than 1 image to the USB drive. Right? This will all have to wait until tomorrow. Boss is gone for the day and I'll have to get it approved before I can buy anything. I sure hope this will get this resolved!
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Dan Goodell

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Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops
Reply #19 - Oct 11^th, 2005 at 1:25am

"If I do a disk to disk, from laptop to usb, then usb to laptop and laptop and laptop (and so on), could I then do it from usb to desktop hard drive (for storage purposes)?"

As NightOwl said, use images. Images are files, not partitions, so they can be stored anywhere files can go. You can burn them to cd/dvd, or store multiple images on another drive or network share.

Just make sure the source disk is seen in its proper geometry while the image is being created, and the target disk is seen in its proper geometry at the time the image is being restored, and it won't matter where the image is stored in between.

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	Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops Reply #20 - Oct 11^th, 2005 at 1:47am Dan I had a question in Reply 15 that I think you missed--why will the HDD that has been cloned disk-to-disk on a different system that sees the geometry different, and then put on a system (the laptop) that calculates the geometry differently, boot successfully using the WinXP emergency boot floppy disk?
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Dan Goodell

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Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops
Reply #21 - Oct 11^th, 2005 at 1:54am

"Does the mis-matched geometry only effect where the system looks for the files used for booting?"

When I said mismatched geometry wouldn't work, that was a broad generalization. It may work for awhile, but it's a ticking time bomb just waiting to blow up on you.

What won't work is read/writes that are based on geometry. XP actually uses LBA addressing for most read/write functions, so if it can get past the boot phase, geometry is taken out of loop and becomes immaterial--at least, for typical day-to-day operations, that is.

But it may blow up when you get to one of the geometry-based disk access operations, such as some Disk Management functions. You can also run into trouble if you have multiple partitions, or when trying to access the disk near the end of a partition because there is ambiguity about exactly where the partition ends. And for heaven's sake, don't ever let XP try to scan or repair "errors" while you're running with mismatched geometry.

IOW, if it boots you're probably not doing immediate damage to your file system, but in the long run you really want to fix the mismatch.

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crbell

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Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops
Reply #22 - Oct 11^th, 2005 at 5:24pm

Dan,
I'm waiting for my USB hard drive to come in.

Hopefully that will get all of these laptops taken care of.

In the meantime, I figured I'd mess with my "Ghosting Desktop" and not have it autodetect the 2 laptop drives. I went into the bios and changed from autodetect to 5168/240/63 for both drives. Booted to the ghost boot disk, and when it shows the drives to be ghosted, it shows 4863/255/63 instead. I figured I'd go ahead and try disk to disking it, with an -ib switch. No go. Installed both laptop hds into the desktop, changed the bios to 4863/255/63, and proceeded to disk to disk it again. Same deal.

Dan, when you said "In the old days we used to have a bios option to manually tell it what geometry to use. ", where you talking about changing it from auto to user and specifying, because that is what I did.

I'm including another findpart.txt, this one is from the desktop with both laptop hard drives plugged in.

Findpart, version 4.42.
Copyright Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, 1999-2004.

OS: DOS 7.10 Partition tables:

Disk: 1 Cylinders: 4864 Heads: 255 Sectors: 63 MB: 38154

-PCyl N ID -----Rel -----Num ---MB -Start CHS- --End CHS-- BS CHS
0 1*07 63 78124977 38146 0 1 1 1023 239 63 OK NB
0 1 1 4863 14 63 Actual

Disk: 2 Cylinders: 4864 Heads: 255 Sectors: 63 MB: 38154

-PCyl N ID -----Rel -----Num ---MB -Start CHS- --End CHS-- BS CHS
0 1*07 63 78124032 38146 0 1 1 4862*254 63 OK OK

Am I doing something wrong? Which way should I set the bios? Should I just be patient and wait for the usb drive?

Thanks!

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Dan Goodell

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Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops
Reply #23 - Oct 11^th, 2005 at 11:05pm

"when you said "In the old days we used to have a bios option to manually tell it what geometry to use. ", where you talking about changing it from auto to user and specifying, because that is what I did."

Yeah, that's the option I was thinking of.

"I figured I'd mess with my "Ghosting Desktop" and not have it autodetect the 2 laptop drives. I went into the bios and changed from autodetect to 5168/240/63 for both drives. Booted to the ghost boot disk, and when it shows the drives to be ghosted, it shows 4863/255/63 instead."

Bummer. That's what I would have expected to work.

Bios code is one of the least standardized pieces of any computer, so behavior can be wildly variable. Perhaps the bios works different than we're expecting and is ignoring you. Or what might be just as likely, perhaps Ghost is bypassing the bios and issuing an ATAPI IDEIDENT command itself directly to the controller on the HDD.

I wouldn't be surprised to find findpart bypasses the bios because findpart is a "discovery" kind of tool, so by the nature of its job it has to consider that pieces of the puzzle may not be working right. But it's possible Ghost might also work by bypassing the bios.

Whether it's the bios or Ghost, though, it doesn't look like it's your fault. For whatever reason, the hardware just isn't going to let you do what you want.

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Dan Goodell

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Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops
Reply #24 - Oct 11^th, 2005 at 11:23pm

Just as an aside, crbell, this is one reason I habitually split laptop hard disks into at least two partitions. This avoids all the hassles of imaging my IBM laptops, with their odd autodetecting. With two (or more) partitions, I simply leave the HDD in the laptop and image the OS partition into a file on the second partition. If I want, I can always move the image(s) to cd/dvd or across the network later, after I'm back in Windows.

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crbell

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	Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops Reply #25 - Oct 17^th, 2005 at 6:19pm Update!! The USB HD worked!! I used NightOwl's very detailed instructions found here: http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=10954... I have finally gotten this to work!! Thank you both for your continued help on this. It was definitely a learning experience.
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tnoone

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Re: Mysterious Problem, cloning laptops
Reply #26 - Feb 10^th, 2007 at 4:47am

Hi,

I had the problem of cloning an XP NTFS harddisk from a non-name notebook and installing it in an IBM ThinkPad X30.
After re-installing Windows the ThinkPad wouldn't boot from harddisk, only from a boot diskette.
TestDisk showed NTFS to have 255 heads, but the harddrive to have 240 heads. But changing the geometry, writing new a new mbr and all the repair console tools where of no help.

My solution:
I compared the boot sectors of a freshly installed XP on my ThinkPad, that would boot, to the boot sector of the non-booting harddrive.
At hex 7E1A my booting sector hat F0 (= 240), my non-booting sector showed FF (= 255).
I booted the ThinkPad with BartPE and used TinyHex to directly change the value from FF to F0 on the installed non-booting harddrive.
That solved my problem.

Hope it helps.

Thomas

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