You say you have .775 build, and I believe .793 build is needed to work with SATA drives which may be why it's not recognized.  Go to the link in the first post at http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1206707882 to update to .793 build.

Hi Tator,
            Thanks for the comment. Do I have to make a new Installation CD? I already have version 793 on my diskette. Can I copy the CD contents to say my hard drive, replace the old Ghost.exe with the newer Ghost.exe and then make a boot CD.

Hi NightOwl,
                My machine is from last year---An HP 8710W mobile workstation. Yes I have 4 partitions on my machine and they are all NTFS, including the one where I store my Ghost images. For the CD-ROM drive, it's a HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T20L. I don't know if it's SATA but in Device manager > properties > details and under Device Instance Id I found this:

IDE\CDROMHL-DT-ST_DVDRAM_GST-t20L__________NC08_ and some long numbers which follow.


So it's IDE I think.

NO I don't have other USB devices connected. The hard drive of my machine also seems to be IDE....it has the same format as the one for the CD drive. In System information under Storage, I find only IDE and nothing is shown for SCSI. No SATA.


Yes indeed when using Ghost, the partitions are identified as 1:1 for the system, 1:2 , 1:3 etc. But I have also label the partitions and I see their names also.

You don't have to make a new installation CD.  Just check to verify you have .793 build on your PC which you likely do since you have it on diskette, i.e. if the boot CD was created using the diskette.  To check build on PC find the GhostStart icon, right click it, select properties and select version.  That build will be the same version for Ghost.exe.

Hi NightOwl,
                I get the same messages as you wrote. And I get A:\> but just before that Ghost asked which language to load Ghost. All the languages were being listed and when I wanted to type "English" as my choice, my keyboard was not working. But after A:\> appeared, my keyboard was working again.

So I was not able to load Ghost.


I get Device C:Driver CDROM1 Unit 0 for the CD drive. So it's the C drive.

I then switched off my machine, connected the HDD and boot again. Now it stops at autoexec.bat, and then exits with the message: bad or missing comman interpreter and I get A>

blackeagle

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Google is our friend!!!  Did some searching--is this your system?:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01093115...

Additional specifications:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12731_div/12731_div.HTML

If this is your system--note the HDD is SATA.  It drives me crazy, but for some reason they do not specify what the interface is for the optical drive--but, I have to think it too will be SATA--not likely they are going to put both PATA and SATA controllers in a single laptop at this point in the evolution of storage device interfaces--but without a specification--it could go either way!!!

Do you have any manuals (paper or electronic--i.e. pdf file on system disc or something like that) or other user information that gives you a better idea which optical drive you have--(they are listing several for this model number, and the numbers don't match what you have listed)?

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Yours must be an *international* version--my most recent Ghost 2003 installation disc does not offer a language choice in DOS.

Quote:

Okay, so you do get a drive letter assigned to the optical drive--in that case it must be PATA and not SATA!!!  Interesting!

Quote:

When booting from a bootable optical disc, the boot process creates a *virtual* floppy drive and it's given the A:\ drive letter assignment.

Quote:

Clarify--did you mean to say you can reach the A:\>  prompt *only* if the external HDD is *disconnected*?

So, if your optical drive is PATA--and you loose the command interpreter if you connect the USB HDD, that means there is probably a conflict with your USB HDD and the DOS USB driver--I now suspect that your laptop's BIOS is also loading a built-in USB driver and the DOS USB driver loaded during boot is then conflicting with the BIOS and causing the problem.

Are you familiar with looking around the system's BIOS?  You might want to see what options are there for controlling what the BIOS does as far as USB support.  On some systems, folks have found that they have to disable something like *Legacy USB Support* or some other similar option so the BIOS does not load its USB support. 

Also, you might have to disable being able to *boot* from a USB HDD or flashdrive in order to avoid a conflict with the DOS USB driver.  You'll have to look and see what options are listed there.

(I've seen some recent references suggesting that if a system's BIOS supports booting from an external USB HDD, you can avoid the conflict issues by creating a separate small boot partition on the USB HDD and setting it up to boot to DOS and load Ghost from that external USB HDD boot partition--the rest of the HDD (other partitions) would still be for storage.  I don't have a system that has that ability--so can not test whether all that really works or not!)

You do not want to disable the USB *controller*--if you do that then there will be no access to USB even by the DOS USB driver.

Let us know what you come up with.

Hi NightOwl and Voximan,
                                  I'm sorry for suddenly going silent as you might have noticed. I've have had my hands full during the past weeks. I have read your comments and will print them out so that I can go carefully through them.

NightOwl, yes indeed the links you gave are for my machine.

I would ask you guys to be patient with me. I'll come back to you in a few days. Wish there were more than 24 hours in a day!