Boot disk failure

[mksa]

I'm trying to image the hard drive from a HP ZE5170 laptop that has been dropped and has a broken floppy drive. The laptop has a combination CD-RW/DVD drive. I created a floppy emulated bootable CD to start Ghost. When I try to boot the laptop I get three strange symbols that stay on the screen with a blinking cursor. Hitting enter produces a "Boot Disk Failure" message. I can take the same CD to two other computers and they boot up into PC DOS with no problem. I thought maybe it was because I had burned the CD on a different PC, so I went back and burned a new CD with the laptop. It produced the same results. It will boot up other computers but not the laptop. All the computers are running XP-Pro with SP-1. I can find no firmware updates for the burner on HP's site. I used 1.44 floppy emulation when I burned the CD's. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[JRBeltman]

What is it exactly that you are trying to do with the cd and on which laptop?

JR
(In need of a cool signature)

 

[mksa]

I'm trying to boot PC DOS in order to run ghost and image the hard drive on the laptop that has the broken floppy drive. Getting the image to the external drive isn't the problem. It's getting it restored. I need a bootable CD in order to boot ghost and access the image on the external drive.

 

[Lemon13]

do the symbols look like keys?
can you go into bios (i suppose so)?
check if there is a setting that blocks boot from removable drives (check also pw settings in bios).

 

[mksa]

I can get into bios with no problem, and all the settings look good. Nothing is disabled as far as boot. There is no PW set. There are three symbols, the one in the middle resembles a heart, and the other two perhaps foreign looking symbols.

 

[micker377]

You're not using "Go-Back" are you? This will mess up any "image".

 

[mksa]

No, I'm not using "Go-Back". The combo drive is listed in device manager as a QSI CDRW/DVD SBW-241. The problem is only related to getting the latptop to boot from a bootable CD. It will boot to several burned bootable CD's that I have around; Windows, Linux, Emergency Boot Disk, etc.

 

[COMPUTERGUY138]

I have had this problem before as well the solution that worked for me was to split the image onto two cd's for some reason the cd was so close to full that it would not boot. If you need instructions on how to split the image to two cd's let me know.

 

[DragonQ0105]

You could try to replace the floppy drive - they're not exactly expensive - and then try to use a floppy to boot?

 

[mksa]

Thanks, everybody. The CD image was very small (less that 1.44 meg). The floppy replacement for the laptop was a little too steep for me, so I just bought an external USB floppy for less that half what the HP unit would have cost. Problem fixed.

 

[jm3938]

There has been a signature failure error.
Used the -IB when ghosting and this did not fix the problem. Found that after installing our zen agent the master boot record is corrupted. Used the XP CD to boot up, then chose R for repair. At the C:\windows prompt type fixmbr.