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Laptop boot from Ghost 2003 CD not consistent - usually fails (Read 4822 times)
bilsch
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Laptop boot from Ghost 2003 CD not consistent - usually fails
Apr 13th, 2008 at 2:39pm
 
Hello.

The laptop is HP Pavilion DV2000t with 120 GB PATA HD.  My objective is to boot the laptop with a Ghost 2003 CD, install USB drivers during boot and create an image file of the main laptop partition.  The image file will be created on an external USB hard drive.

In about 20 attempts the system booted correctly only one time.  All the other times it hung up during boot or else got all the way through boot but the USB drive was not accessible.  The text lines on the screen when it hangs during boot indicate that it is hanging while loading drivers from CONFIG.SYS.  But it doesn't always hang on the same driver.  The CONFIG.SYS file loads many drivers for SCSI and other devices that I don't have.  That's how the designers ensure the booted system will work with most types of storage devices you might have connected to the computer. 

Probably there are command line switches that allow me to prevent unnecessary drivers from loading, but I don't know what those are, and I also don't know which particular driver I need for the DVD-RW drive on the laptop.

Sometimes the system makes it through boot without hanging up but it can't see my USB drive.  Only one time it got all the way through boot and was able to see the USB drive.  I successfully ran Ghost and created an image on the USB drive but the program froze up after the image was created.

I will appreciate your suggestions on how to get this laptop booted up successfully every time.  If you know of archived posts that might help please give me a link.

TIA.   Bill S.

 
 
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Nigel Bree
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Re: Laptop boot from Ghost 2003 CD not consistent - usually fails
Reply #1 - Apr 14th, 2008 at 5:37am
 
The first thing I'd try and rule out is a design fault in the BIOS in the machine, from the symptoms. HP are normally one of the best vendors there is (along with IBM) in terms of the compatibility of their firmware but boot problems are due to BIOS design faults far more often than any other cause, and I know that at least one series of HP machines has one of the faults we commonly see.

Pretty much all the machines we find with boot lockup problems we've investigated tend to have buggy INT13 hard-disk access code in their BIOSes - with GSS2.5 we already use our own INT13 wrapper to fix buggy USB BIOS support, and it's reached the stage where it's possible we'll use it everywhere just because increasingly many vendors seem to be making machines that have defective BIOSes.

I don't know how you built your boot CD, but something you can try to work around some of these problems is to use floppy emulation for the boot part instead of hard-disk emulation, and have the emulated floppy just contain the drivers to set you up to get the rest of the recovery environment by mounting the CD with MSCDEX. This tends to work around boot problems because the BIOS hard-disk emulations tend to not always be spec-compliant with modern INT13, whereas the older floppy API set is simpler and therefore harder for the system vendors to get wrong.
 
 
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bilsch
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Re: Laptop boot from Ghost 2003 CD not consistent - usually fails
Reply #2 - Apr 16th, 2008 at 11:31pm
 
Thank you for the info.
 
 
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