A couple of things I've read hear and elsewhere make me think I should be able to restore a partition to an unformatted disc, and, indeed, that it's the only way that the boot sector will be restored with my c:\ partition restore (just to re-emphasise, I'm restoring from partition, not disc, images).   Having conducted a low level format of the target drive, however, it is greyed out when I come to chose the disc to restore to in ghost (although I did agree when ghost asked me if it could mark the disc for use by ghost).

Have I misunderstood?  Do I have to fdisk first?  What's the minimum I have to do to the disc for ghost to be able to use it, and, specifically, make sure that the boot sector is restored with the root partition.

Apologies if this question is answered already, but I could seem to find it.

Thanks

mrlarge

(First--Brian--thank you for remembering that reference above--I was trying to find it!)

I think it depends on which Ghost procedure you are attempting!  

If you are selecting *Local > Partition > From Image*--then the destination partition has to already exist--because Ghost will not alter the existing HDD layout if you are restoring only a partition to a partition (and that's what this procedure is for)--so if you have not already partitioned the HDD, there will be no partition to choose--so that *destination* HDD will not be selectable (greyed out)!

If you select *Local > Disk > from Image*--now you are telling Ghost to use the image to create both the disk structure (partition) and to restore the partition image--and Ghost will create the partition structure for you--as well as restore that partition to the disk--and it will create the MBR--even if you only imaged your single OS partition.  Your image can be of a single OS partition, or an image of a multi-partitioned HDD--you will have to select the single partition after selecting the image file if there are more than one partition in the image--or you could select more than one partition to restore if that's what you wanted.  You are going to get a screen asking what size you want Ghost to make the partition(s) on the HDD--regardless of whether the HDD is larger or smaller than the original size of the partition(s) you imaged--you can adjust the size to be larger or smaller as long as the data will fit.  The *default* will be to use the *whole* HDD, but if you make the partition smaller, then the unused (unallocated) space can be partitioned to your liking later after you boot to your OS or use some other DOS tool to do additional partitioning.

So, it's not whether you created an image that was a *whole disk* image, but rather how you tell Ghost you want to restore the image.  If it's your intention to restore only the one partition to a specific place, then that place needs to already exist.

Hopefully this makes sense--try the two different options to see the different behavior of Ghost--you will not have made any changes to the HDD until you click *Proceed with...* the procedure you have set up.  So you can look at the setup all you want to see what it looks like until that final command!

If you select *Local > Disk > From Image*, then your HDD should not be *greyed out* as a destination.

NightOwl, I getting flying time on Ghost 2003 now.

My master HD was WinXP and a data partition. This afternoon I imaged the WinXP partition to the data partition with Ghost 2003. I deleted the partitions from the slave HD, booted to Ghost 2003 and chose Local > Partition > From Image. It worked.

I then deleted the partition on the slave HD and zeroed absolute sector 0 with DE. With Ghost 2003 I tried Local > Partition > From Image. It didn't work as the Unallocated Space was greyed out.

I made the slave HD a master and ran fdisk /mbr. Checked with DE and there was a MBR. The HD was made a slave again. I looked at it with PM and there was a 8 GB primary NTFS partition and 12 GB of Unallocated Space. I've no idea where the primary partition came from after fdisk /mbr. I deleted the partition so the HD was all Unallocated Space.

Using Ghost 2003 I chose Local > Partition > From Image. It worked.

Interesting.

mrlarge,

As you found, fdisk /mbr only works on the master HD. I tried TeraByte's MBRWork and it does allow you to write boot code to any of your HDs.

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

I tried this after having deleted absolute sector 0 from the slave HD.

From MBRWork  I chose #7 (Change active hard drive)
choose HD number to get slave HD
#5 (Install standard MBR code)
#3 (Just set the bootable flag)
Yes
#7 (Change active HD)
Drive 0
Exit

Ghost will now work with this HD to restore an image.

mrlarge

Quote:

I repeat--from my *reply #2 above*:

Quote:

NightOwl wrote on Nov 26^th, 2006 at 3:12pm:


NightOwl, I missed that point too in your earlier post. You are correct, as usual.