One BING to rule them all, One BING to find them, One BING to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

if I ever need to change this hard drive to a newer one, will I need to use the CD again, or will NG14 copy the disk and the boot details across to the new HDD correctly.

I’m not sure why you can’t see unallocated space from your Ghost as that’s how people successfully clone in this forum. I cloned into unallocated space this morning.


We need to make a distinction between problems with Ghost and problems with the NT family of OS. There are two general rules for cloning these OS as outlined in this link …

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm


Do not let old-XP see the new partition before cloning.
Doing so would give XP a chance to assign a drive letter, it will be remembered by the registry when it is cloned, and the clone will adopt the wrong drive letter for itself.



Do not let new-XP see the old-XP partition the first time it boots.
If new-XP sees old-XP, it won't reuse the original drive letter when it assigns a drive letter to itself. (Once XP-2 has booted and reallocated new drive letters, the old-XP partition can be reintroduced into the system, if desired.)



You broke the first rule. You let the old OS see the partition on the second HD before the clone. You are correct that a lot of people have a problem when using Ghost. But it’s not a bug in Ghost. It is the way these OS behave when they are cloned. It’s nothing to do with formatting either. The Ghost user-guides from Ghost 9 to Ghost 14 say “The new hard drive does not need to be formatted.” This could be interpreted by some as “you can use a formatted disk”. If you do, the copied OS will not boot. What the guide should say is “You can either copy into unallocated space or into a partition without a drive letter.” If a drive letter is present, with or without formatting, the copied OS will not boot.


The other issue with cloning is what to do with the HDs immediately after the clone has been created. The user-guides for Ghosts 9 and 10 had confusing instructions and subsequent user-guides have no instructions at all. The second rule applies to this situation.

Ghost creates partition clones. It can’t create whole disk clones. Acronis True Image can’t create partition clones. It can create whole disk clones. When Acronis TI creates a clone it doesn’t create an exact copy of the original HD. It writes to the registry of the new HD to get around both of the rules quoted above. You had success with Acronis TI and so do I. I’ve tried hard to make an Acronis TI clone fail and I can’t. So why isn’t writing to the registry a good idea? If you look at the Acronis TI forum, the procedure with the most failures is the cloning process. So it doesn’t work for everyone.

Getting back to the mistake many people make, breaking the first or second Rules. As you found, Windows won’t boot because of a drive letter issue. But this can be corrected in less than a minute by zeroing or altering the DiskID and forcing Windows to recalculate Partition Signatures. There are many ways to do this but the easiest ways are fdisk /mbr from a Win98 boot floppy or by using Clear Sig from a BING CD. Once the DiskID has been zeroed, Windows then boots normally. By breaking either of the above rules, the Ghost clone will fail to boot, but the failed clone can always be made to boot by zeroing the DiskID.

on old HDD was the J drive with all games in it.If I use NG14 to copy the J drive to a partition on the new HDD, will all games work ok?