Radified Community Forums - help Ghost 2003 image new Dell Precision M4300

ds44myth1

Ex Member

help Ghost 2003 image new Dell Precision M4300
Sep 12^th, 2008 at 7:40pm

Hello

I started reading this and other pages PRIOR to trying to ghost my new PC to decide which version of Ghost to use. I have always used Ghost 2003 with my old IBM and a Dell Inspiron 8600 (both are XP Pro) using a floppy to boot into Ghost DOS and running the "old fashioned" way to backup or restore my drives to external USB drives.

I tried booting my new M4300 on the same floppy and am stuck with the following issue: it goes through the boot process but if the external USB drive is connected I get to Ghost DOS but I only see an hourglass- I never get to the OK button or the menus. However, if I only have the floppy and no USB external drives connected I get to the Ghost DOS screen, but I only have a single hard drive and don't have a target drive to store the image. I've tried with an external USB drive which was used to backup images of my other PCs as well as a FAT32 USB drive which was not.

Here are the 2 things I need help with:

1- I can't figure out why the external USB drive is stalling when it gets to the Ghost DOS (I can move the mouse and the hourglass is moving around so the PC is not frozen, just stuck waiting for the OK button in Ghost DOS)

2- I also saw a post or two on here about SATA drives - I believe my new notebook's internal drive is SATA although I don't know what type my old PC used. If that is causing this please help me resolve it. Once I resolve issue number 1, will I also have a potential issue if I'm backing up my PC if it is using a SATA drive if the external USB is not SATA??

Thanks for your help

IP Logged

TheShadow

Kahuna

Offline

Old Ghost user!

Posts: 613
Florida, USA

Back to top

Re: help Ghost 2003 image new Dell Precision M4300
Reply #1 - Sep 12^th, 2008 at 9:19pm

Two things I'd do.....

I'd get a later version of Ghost,,,,your Ghost 2003 must be at least Build 793 and even that won't work with Vista.
Then get a copy of Partition Magic 8 and set up a storage partition on your only hard drive, where you could put a Ghost Image as well as other files that don't need to be on C: .

You didn't do your do's and tell us all about your PC, OS, etc.
Without that info, we can't do much more to help you.

I'm sitting here also wondering why you don't just back up to DVD's. You surely have a DVD writer in a NEW computer. Not necessarily with a DELL. Wink

IP Logged

ds44myth1

Ex Member

Back to top

Re: help Ghost 2003 image new Dell Precision M4300
Reply #2 - Sep 13^th, 2008 at 12:31pm

TheShadow wrote on Sep 12^th, 2008 at 9:19pm:

Two things I'd do.....

I'd get a later version of Ghost,,,,your Ghost 2003 must be at least Build 793 and even that won't work with Vista.
Then get a copy of Partition Magic 8 and set up a storage partition on your only hard drive, where you could put a Ghost Image as well as other files that don't need to be on C: .

You didn't do your do's and tell us all about your PC, OS, etc.
Without that info, we can't do much more to help you.

I'm sitting here also wondering why you don't just back up to DVD's. You surely have a DVD writer in a NEW computer. Not necessarily with a DELL. Wink

Hello

Thanks for your reply. I want to just keep using what works, although I have copies of Ghost 9, 10, 12, and 14.

My new pc is a Dell Precision M4300 running Windows XP sp2, has an internal SATA hard drive with one NTFS partition running everything although it may have a 2nd partition with a FAT format.

I just want to be able to image the entire drive as it is without installing any more software, save the image on an external USB hard drive, put in a new blank hard drive, and restore the image to the new hard drive. I want to save the original image on my external USB drive in case I ever want to start over from scratch. I don't care about doing images while I'm running Windows - just want to be able to back up images and restore them to whatever SATA hard drive I put into my new M4300 notebook.

I don't plan to use Vista for some time. My old Ghost 2003 build 793 works fine today to image my older 8600 notebook drive (IDE), but for some reason the same floppy that I use to boot Ghost on my old 8600 doesn't work on my new M4300 if the external USB drive is connected (it does work if I'm not connected to an external drive but that defeats the purpose since I want the whole drive imaged and not just a single partition).

Please help

IP Logged

TheShadow

Kahuna

Offline

Old Ghost user!

Posts: 613
Florida, USA

Back to top

Re: help Ghost 2003 image new Dell Precision M4300
Reply #3 - Sep 16^th, 2008 at 4:30pm

Well, Ghost 2003 may not really be the best thing to do what you want to do.
You still have not answered my question! What version (Build #) is your Ghost 2003?

Anything less than Build 793 WILL NOT do the job for you.
If you'll just run Ghost in DOS and type:
Ghost.exe /ver
The resulting text will tell you the build number.

I love Ghost as much as the next guy, but when it won't work, then I look for what does work.

I've done almost exactly what you're saying you want to do, but with a Dell XPS 400 with dual 160gig SATA2 Drives and one external USB drive.

It took me many days and lots of fussing with it to finally get it to run a single drive and not the original RAID configuration.

I installed MaxBlast, from one of the CD's that I got with New Maxtor drives. MaxBlast made a boot CD for me. Then I deleted Maxblast from my PC.

From the boot CD, I was able to clone my C: drive to the external USB drive and then clone it back into the system onto the 2nd 160 gig SATA2 drive.
Clone here, Clone there, Clone everywhere! Grin

The Backup/Cloning software in Maxblast is actually "Acronis True Image".

Since that first trial which worked swimmingly, I've also tried Ghost 11.5 on a boot CD. It worked just like I knew it would, to do the same job that Maxblast did.
It looks and runs almost identical to Ghost 2003, with only very slight differences. Too small to mention, actually.

Again, just guessing, since I don't know the brand of your HD's,
Maxblast will only work if you have ONE Maxtor drive somewhere in your Pc. Seatools from Seagate uses the same Acronis software but is keyed to only work on systems containing a Seagate HD.

But, Ghost 11.5 just don't care. It'll back up anything. Roll Eyes

Cheers!

The Shadow Cool

IP Logged

	Welcome, Guest. Please Login