Hello all,

I'm having serious problems getting XP Pro working from Ghost v9 backup images.  I've started the thread in the following url http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?t=23145 at an XP related forum but I fear we're running out of options there.  If you would be kind enough to read my most recent post there on page 7 (dated today 12/23/06) it will fill you in on some of what's been done, and though it would be better to read it from the start I realize that's a lot to ask.

The problem is basically this.... After several successful reboots into XP, XP will load its boot screen (the one with the blue progress bar) and the progress bar never stops running.  I can't get to the logon screen, cannot boot into safe mode, nor boot using any of the other options in XP's advanced boot menu (last known good config, etc).  My only way to get XP running again is to perform another Ghost restore of the D partition (where XP's OS files are located), then run it until XP craps out again.  I must have done that 30 or 40 times already, this has been going on since the 1st week of November.

The reason for restoring Ghost images is that the hard disk went bad.  The machine was working perfectly up to that point for well over a year.  The ONLY thing that changed in the machine's configuration was the replacement of the bad 40gb disk with a new 200gb disk.  And yes, the Promise Ultra100 controller does have the latest BIOS and driver updates that support drives over 137gb.

I am so frustrated and tired of typing about this that I don't know where to start here.  In fact it may not even be a Ghost related problem but there are indications it could be, and I know of no better place to turn for Ghost advice than here.  I'd dread the thought of repeating all the details I posted in that thread, so I'd really appreciate it if someone could review the details there and then post back here with some questions or advice.

Thanks

I just discovered you had 7 pages of posts in your reference thread on AumHa forums.

Originally I just read the one page you mentioned.  So I probably don't understand the full history of what you have done or tried.

I had the same exact results using a Promise Ultra 100 contoller. I upgraded the BIOS the same as you did because the Promise website said the new BIOS would support drives larger than 137 GB. They lied!!!!!! After a number of times having Windows wiped out, I upgraded the card to the Ultra 133. Problem solved. This has nothing top do with Ghost. The Promise card is to blame.

mustang wrote on Dec 23^rd, 2006 at 8:59pm:


Mustang,
Thank you for your reply.  Please tell me more about the results you had.  What symptoms led you to believe Windows was wiped out?  Was it an endlessly looping blue progress bar on the XP boot screen that never allowed the XP logon screen to appear?

When your machine was booting, did the Promise 100 BIOS display the correct size of the large disk?

In addition to upgrading the new BIOS on the Promise Ultra100 card, did you also update to the new Windows driver supplied by Promise?  Both the new BIOS and the new drivers must be present for large drive support in Windows.

Help_Seeker,

Thanks for your detailed reply.  It's evident from this and the AumHA forum, you've tried a lot.

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I'm glad to see that XP was never booted with both disks in the PC at the same time; that can cause gradual corruption.

NightOwl and Mustang both gave excellent tips.  The reason I also mentioned removing the Promise IDE card was to eliminate it as a possibility.  You can probably change one of the Seagate jumpers to restrict the drive size to less than 137 gb if you want to test that.

Just the fact that Promise card is seeing a newer technology hard drive, and especially one that is faster and has different timing for i/o to and from your motherboard to the drive, could explain that theory.  Wonder how cheap a newer 133 Promise card would be?  Probably not very costly.

Glad to see you have a good save Ghost image backup(s).  If/when you try again, I would avoid manipulating the partitions with Partition Magic until much later, like after it is working for several weeks.  You don't want to introduce another variable.

As an aside, what model HP printer do you have and what are you trying to print with it?  You should be able to get that to work under XP.

Finally, I would be careful about trying an XP repair install on your 200gb system.  I haven't ever heard of anyone that has a d: system drive doing that.  I'm worried that the repair install may set xp back to c: which you don't want.  (I could be wrong on this point, but just be careful).

Hey man, get that controller upgraded to the 133 or stay with a 120 GB hard drive. No kidding!!!!!! You're wasting alot of people's time here, not to mention your own.

I had a great deal of experience with these cards years ago.  On a good motherboard they were great. They used to double the speed of the hards drives on older systems like your's. You could actally see this running Ghost from DOS. On a not so good motherboard, they would cause Windows to become unstable. You would get a BSOD usually in the first 10 min. of use. Remove the card and the system would be stable. Not so hard to understand when you consider the HDD speed running through the PCI bus was doubled.

I had your problem on a customer's computer I had built. It was a good Asus motherboard and ran very stable with the Ultra 100 card and 120 GB drives. I updated both the BIOS and the drivers of the 100 card. Replacing the drives with 200 GB drives resulted in your exact symptoms. He would get a day or two of use and then Windows wouldn't boot. Sound familiar? Examining the disk showed large blocks of files were missing. This guy talked to another guy that told him the Promise card might be the problem. I insisted it was not the problem and showed him the Promise website. Sound familiar? Finally, I tried replacing the card with an Ultra 133 just to prove this other guy wrong. Well, didn't I look bad when it solved the problem!

A quick look at Price Watch shows the 133 is available for $53. To replace the card follow this procedure:

1. Leave the drives connected to the Ultra 100 card. Put the Ultra 133 card into an empty PCI slot.

2. Boot into Windows and install the driver for the 133 card when you see the New Hardware Wizard.

3. Shut down, remove the 100 card and connect the drives to the 133 card. (You can switch the 133 card to the slot the 100 was in if you like.)

4. Boot up and hope Windows likes the new card. It always worked for me.

I'm not trying to be hard on you. As you might be able to tell, I'm still fuming mad at Promise all these years later.

Good luck

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I'm surprised that changing the jumper setting resulted in 32gb size.  I would have thought it would give you 120gb.

Are your sure your bios is set to auto detect or lba?  Maybe your pc bios for the hard drive has been manually set wrong.

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One thing to consider is that your newer Seagate contains an 8 mb or 16 mb buffer.  This is to improve throughput and response time.  I'm guessing that under heavier i/o loading is when the Promise card fails.  Maybe explains why it works for awhile.

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NightOwl,

Yes, I totally agree.  It's too strong of an indicator to ignore.  However, I'm not just going on what the hardware *says*.  The following 3rd party utilities independently confirm it.  XP's Disk Mgmt reports all partitions as healthy, Partition Magic's utilities report no errors, Ghost's partition info utility reports no errors, and they all report the correct partition sizes.  As well, Seagate's diagnostics found nothing wrong, and it checks the motherboard, controller and disk partitions.  In fact, my thinking is as yours in that I already considered getting a smaller disk.  Already knowing the jumpered limit is only 32gb I thought I'd try using Seagate's "set disk size" utility to downsize the disk's capacity instead.  When I tried using it this was the message I got.....
"This command cannot be executed and is not necessary for this drive since it is attached to an additional controller".

In my last post I was hoping that 40 to 50 reboots would signal the end of my problem.  Unfortunately, when I got to the 5th reboot the problem started again:-(  Downsizing the 200gb to its jumpered 32gb size did not work.

I was curious, however, about what the XP OS might see with the jumpered 200gb.  Since nobody here could say whether using the jumper is guaranteed to emulate a 32gb physical disk, I ran Everest Home edition to see what it would report about it, and then compared the results to my other machine, which does have a physical (non-jumpered) 40gb disk.  Although Everest did report the disk's size as 32gb, it also reported that it DOES support 48-bit addressing and such; whereas the other machine reports that its 40gb disk does NOT support it.  In other words, aside from the reported size, it appears that the jumpered disk is still reporting its 200gb features.

Although I don't know a lot about those matters, it nags at me that a 32gb disk would report support for 48-bit addressing, if in fact 48-bit support isn't needed for disks under 137gb.  Anyway, there appears to be something unknown occurring now, that didn't occur before when XP (and the controller) was working fine with a physically smaller disk.  It's looking more and more like my next move would be to replace the disk, and after reading Ghost4Me's comments I think it would be prudent to limit its cache buffer to 2 mb to match the old disk.  I can get a Seagate 40gb w/2mb cache but am wondering if I should switch brands as well as sizes.  You have experience using Seagate disks, what do you think?


As an aside....
Prior to limiting the disk's capacity to 32gb, Ghost originally had a problem seeing the disk's full 200gb size.  I wasted a lot of time making more than a dozen restorations without a peep from Ghost - no alerts, no messages, nothing.  Then finally, on the next restore, in Ghost's "select a destination" dialog I noticed as I went to choose the first partition's destination that Ghost was offering me only 128gb of unallocated space on disk1.  It should have been 186.  Before that I was just choosing unallocated space on disk1 without actually making note of "how much" space Ghost was reporting in that dialog.  But that stopped when I started loading the updated Promise driver when booting Ghost from the CD.  After that it showed 186gb, the same size reported by the Promise BIOS at boot time.

Although Ghost9 says it supports the Ultra driver, apparently the version of the Ultra driver contained on the CD predates the driver that supports drives larger than 137gb.  I'm surprised Ghost wasn't smart enough to see it was loading its own Ultra 100 (non 48-bit driver) version for use with a large disk requiring the 48-bit driver.  In hindsight it seems Ghost doesn't look at the disk directly to evaluate its capacity, but rather looks at what its own outdated controller driver reports.  An alert would have been most helpful in that regard.  But even when I force Ghost to load the correct updated Ultra driver it complains about it, says I don't need to do it, and insists it already has the needed drivers.  It was this sort of behavior that prompted me to post here, to see what other quirks Ghost might have that I'm not aware of.

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I'd give anything for an XP error message, or even a log file, but I've never received either.  XP just craps out without warning and without leaving a clue.  I too have a 2nd system, almost identical to this one.  That's another reason why I have to get to the bottom of this, I'll likely need to replace that disk some day too.