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mschwartz

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Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes
Feb 13^th, 2008 at 8:09pm

I'm trying to restore a Windows XP computer, which now won't boot, to a previous stage, when it would. I had just made a Ghost 10.0 image of the C: drive a few days before the crash. Since I can't boot Windows, I'm booting from the Ghost installation CD. Everything on the CD seems to work (the Help file, the version of Ghost 8.2), and in particular the file browser finds my Ghost image and shows me the files it contains.

What doesn't work is the "Recover My Computer" function. If you click on it, your mouse pointer turns into a hand, the CD and the HD both run, off and on, for perhaps a minute, and then nothing further happens. I've tried this several times.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be, and what I might do about it?

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Brian

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	Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes Reply #1 - Feb 13^th, 2008 at 8:36pm mschwartz, Has the CD worked in the past? Does the CD work in other computers? Do you have another CD drive that you can try in your computer?
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mschwartz

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Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes
Reply #2 - Feb 14^th, 2008 at 12:14pm

Yes, now that you mention it, the CD does work on another computer. What's interesting is that the two computers are virtually identical: same MB, same CPU, same RAM. The CD drives are different (the problem computer has two, not identical, and the disk had the same problem in both), and so are the HD's, but I doubt that's the problem.

The only significant difference I see between the two computers is the BIOS version: the one in which the disk works has a more recent version. (As to your other question, yes, the disk has worked before, for the purpose of installing Ghost, and for an HD restore, of the boot drive, initiated from within Windows when Windows was still booting.)

Right now I see two possible approaches:
(1) update the BIOS, in hopes that will solve the problem
(2) reinstall Windows, reinstall Ghost, then do the disk restore

Any other suggestions?

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Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes
Reply #3 - Feb 14^th, 2008 at 1:06pm

mschwartz

Quote:

Any other suggestions?

Well, Brian already suggested trying a *different optical drive*--unplug the two that are not working and put the one from the other system in to see if that works!

Your #1 is reasonable as long as you are comfortable with updating the BIOS--many newer systems do the BIOS update from within Windows--if you can't boot, that's a problem--but, you may also have the option of doing from DOS as well.

#2 will not work if you are restoring the OS partition--you have to boot from the Recovery Disk so the OS is not active when restoring that partition--you can restore other non-active OS partitions from within Windows, however.

I have seen where Brian has created a separate *recovery* active, bootable primary partition with Windows on it, and then installed Ghost 9 or 10 on that--and then restored the backup image file to other unallocated space on the same HDD--now the image of the OS partition is not going to the *active* OS partition--so this works. Then you use a partitioning tool to make the restored OS partition as active and the *recovery* partition *inactive*--or I think you can tell Ghost to make the restored OS partition the *active* boot partition as part of the restore process by putting a check mark in the right box.

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mschwartz

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Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes
Reply #4 - Feb 14^th, 2008 at 10:16pm

Thanks for your thoughts. Here's the solution:

Plugging in a third CD drive didn't help, of course, when neither of the first two had worked.

Updating the BIOS didn't help either. So much for my bright ideas.

Moving both HD's (the boot drive and the other) to my putatively identical computer, on which the Ghost CD had worked, didn't do it either. Begins to sound like a hard-drive problem, though it's not obvious why that would be.

Moved the HD's back to their original computer, booted from the Windows XP installation CD: it said the C: drive wasn't formatted. I let it format the CD drive and install Windows, then pulled it out and booted, yet again, from the Ghost CD. After that all the Ghost functions worked normally, I restored the C: drive to its condition as of February 4th, and now all is well.

Conclusion: the Ghost recovery function wasn't working because it couldn't find a properly formatted C: drive. I find that a bit surprising; you'd think a well-written program would have recognized the problem and let the user know, rather than simply choosing to freeze. But the theory fits the data. What does anyone else think of this?

And why would the C: drive have lost its formatting? It's my wife's computer -- ask her.

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Brian

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Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes
Reply #5 - Feb 15^th, 2008 at 12:24am

mschwartz,

I'm pleased you are on top of the problem. I do recall seeing something similar in the past. When I clicked "Recover My Computer" nothing happened for a minute or two and then it worked. It happened several times but I don't recall how I fixed it. I didn't do anything active. Maybe it just went away.

You certainly don't need a formatted C: drive for Ghost 10 to work. The typical example is a HD failure. You buy a new blank HD. Unformatted and even without a MBR. You can restore an image to this HD. When restoring an image over a good OS partition, it doesn't matter whether you delete that partition before the restore, or not.

A mystery. Let us know if anything comes to mind.

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mschwartz

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Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes
Reply #6 - Feb 15^th, 2008 at 12:49am

Point well taken. Unformatted boot partition is not a sufficient explanation. Since in fact formatting the boot partition solved the problem in this case, conceivably there was something, rather than nothing, on that boot partition, as a consequence of the crash, that interfered with Ghost. Interesting to speculate. Thanks again for your help.

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Brian

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	Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes Reply #7 - Feb 15^th, 2008 at 12:56am Yes, there was something "different" about that partition to give that message. I wonder what would have happened if you had deleted the partition before using Ghost? Who knows.
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SloPoke

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	Re: Ghost 10 Recovery Environment: "Recover My Computer" freezes Reply #8 - Feb 15^th, 2008 at 12:33pm The first thing the Ghost Recovery does when you click on "Recover My Computer" is scan all attached drives looking for images. It sounds like it got stuck scanning the first drive, which happened to be your C drive, due to the corruption of the partition.
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