(Because of the hacking and forum restore back to a couple days ago, the posts I'm quoting below have been erased.  FWIW, I always surf with scripting turned off so I never noticed any problem or slowdown from the hacking.  Anyway, Brian had posted about his experiments with v2003 and a friend with a Microsoft-style 7/8 dualboot.)

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Was Win8 generalized in your experiment?  I think it should work if Win8 is generalized.



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That makes sense to me.

Presuming the original install was to MB-aligned partitions, the "Disk from Image" with Ghost 2003 would reposition the disk's partitions to be cylinder-aligned, right?  Being generalized, the restored Win7 wouldn't care about partition location.

Win8, however, would not be generalized (I don't see how it could be in a Microsoft dualboot) so its BCD entry would be dependent on partition location, and that got changed by the "Disk from Image" operation.  After the Ghost restore BIBM's BCD editor should show "Unknown" for Win8's partition.

Brian wrote on Jan 17^th, 2014 at 1:34pm:


Yeah, it's at that point where I think the restored BCD will initially show "HD 0" and "unknown" instead of "HD 0" and "Win 8.1".

Of course BIBM's BCD editor can correct that, but I think if the original had been "{boot}" instead of "HD 0" then no BCD repair would be needed upon restoration.  I don't think anything changed in 8 vs. Win7 in that regard.

Brian wrote on Jan 17^th, 2014 at 6:42pm:


I don't do Disk Images so can't speak from experience, though I don't see why it should be any different from Partition Images when the OS is generalized.

I used BIBM's BCD editor to generalize the Win8 partition on my HDD rather than bcdedit.  After that I used Ghost 2003 to image/restore that partition to a new partition on my SSD, and the copy booted right up without needing a repair.

Brian

Brian wrote on Jan 12^th, 2014 at 4:35pm:

In one of the *lost postings* due to the site being hacked and later restored--you had posted a workaround solution to this problem--would you kindly re-post the answer to this problem?

I remember the solution--so this question--can one tell the image browsing to list *all files* (like you can do when browsing files in Windows' based programs that are looking for a specific extension), and does the image file then show up?  And if it shows up, can it be loaded?  Or, does it have to have that redundant extension added before it will work correctly with the backup software?  (If the file is manually brought up in a file manager program, can it be *renamed* with the extension to make it usable?)

Just some house keeping questions--thanks.

In my old age, I have one thing left and that's the desire and ability to perform experiments.
It's even best when I can use my years of experience to help someone.

So, tonight I ran a Ghost 11.5 backup of a brand new install of Windows 8.1/Pro/32, on an 80GB SATA II hard drive, and saved the backup Image File to a 30 GB IDE hard drive.

Immediately following the backup, I restored the new image file to the 80 GB SATA II hard drive.

In fear and trepidation and with fingers crossed, I booted up the 9 yr old PC and VOILA, it booted up without any problem at all.  So the Ghost backup of Windows 8.1 and the following restore went off like clockwork..... using Ghost 11.5, booted up with a DOS boot CD.
It looks and runs exactly like Ghost 2003, but it's too large to fit on a floppy disk....ergo the Boot CD.

I did a Google search one day, for Ghost 11.5 and found an ISO of the boot CD.  Amazing what's floating around out there.
I still remember the day, that Nigel said on this very forum that Ghost 11.5 does not exist.
Well, so much for that.  Eh? 

Cheers Mates!

Yes!

Ghost 11.5 is the only backup program that I need for XP, Vista, Win-7, Win-8, and Win-8.1

It works just as well for 8.1 as it did for XP.

I've even tried out Windows 10, over 8.1.  It sucked!  A quick Ghost restore of Win-8.1 did the trick.
I won't be trying Windows 10 again.

happy Holidays!

Old Casper, the friendly Ghost