Cloning error left drive as unrecognized partition- LONG STORY

[jasshrie]

This was the classic mistake- how to loose the contents of your drive when backing it up! Sorry for the long post, but I hope it is descriptive enough...

I will try to describe the sequence of events that lead me to the point where I am now, and maybe someone who is much more skilled than me could offer a suggestion about using a cloning program for backing up:

It all started when I bought a new 40gb drive to replace a 30gb drive (thus allowing me to replace another computer's 4gb hd, but I didn't make it that far).

The machine is a HP Pavilion XT840 with Celeron Processor running WinME with a IBM 30gb drive and 192mb ram.

Since I had a new MAXTOR 40gb drive, and my WinME system was somewhat reliable (if you can call any WinME system reliable), I decided the best thing to do would be to "clone" or copy an image of the IBM drive to the Maxtor to avoid the hassles of reinstalling all of my programs/system files. After a little research, I found that the best choices would be EZ-Drive or GHOST. The following is the sequence of events that ensued:

-Attempted EZ-Drive: EZ-Drive BIOS was installed before EZ-Drive would let me do anything with the disk, next I tried the featuer "disk copy" but for some reason, it said "source drive larger than destination" or something and would not proceed (strange in that the MAXTOR has an extra 10gb on the IBM, maybe it doesn't see the entire drive?

-Formatted MAXTOR with fdisk and tried EZ-Drive "disk copy" again, but same problem.

-Downloaded a slightly newer version of EZ-Drive and tried again; this time it started to do something, but just made a lot of noise, constantly (like one solid tone) system beep, and just threw random characters across the display screen. Finally when the characters quit flowing (system beep and noises were still present) I forced the computer to shutdown.

-Amazingly, the computer rebooted into WinME on the second attempt and at this point I decided to try GHOST for the first time. (now why didn't I just backup files you might ask?...at least that's what I ask myself...)

-I setup GHOST to clone the IBM drive to the MAXTOR (note that I was cloning the system disk, which contains GHOST, to the new disk). Maybe this was my error?

-Since everything looked rosey, when it prompted for a restart to start the cloning process, I gladly clicked "OK".

-Computer went down, came up and immediately displayed the classic "Missing Operating System" message (nothing happen, no copying of the drives or anything by GHOST)

-I put the drive into another computer as a slave to see if I could read it, but it only showed up in the BIOS, not in Windows...

-I exhaustively read through old posts on this forum, and got many good ideas....

-I thought maybe the MBR was messed up and caused the confusion, so I ran fdisk /mbr but no luck.

-fdisk /status shows this: Disk=1, DRIVE=(blank), MBYTES=29310, FREE=(blank), USAGE=100%

-fdisk partition infoARTITION=1, STATUS=A, TYPE=Non-DOS, VOLUME=(blank), LABEL=(blank), MBYTES=29314, SYTEM=(blank), USAGE=100%

-Next I tried Partition Magicand it said: PARTITION=Local Disk, TYPE=EZ-Drive, STATUS=Active, PRIMARY=Primary
PM wouldn't let me change the partition type...

-Next I tried TestDisk, basically it gave the same info as PM, but with this message "Bad Ending Head" which would make sense from the noises I was hearing. See this for the TestDisk.LOG file

http://road.meatball.net/TESTDISK.LOG

-Finally I tried Drive Fitness, which I might add was the only software that correctly identified the name of the single partition as "HP_PAVILION". Drive fitness found a corrupt sector, which I instructed it to fix, and afterwards it confirmed that there were no other damages to the drive.

-Lastly I tried TestDisk again, but same exact result as before.

I should note that I intermediately looked at the drive with fdisk and EZ-Drive to see if there was any other insight into partition type or whatever, but no luck. EZ-Drive seemed to want to re-partition and format the disk.

Now I have played with EZ-Drive again, I selected the "Restore 0 Disk" option and found that it had made a backup of the partition table and boot sector before it installed EZ BIOS. Naturally, I restored this, since that was the start of the whole problem, and rebooted.... after 2 days of pulling my hair out about the fact that I may have lost all of my documents and files.....

PRESTO! The drive is back (I have it hooked up as a slave drive, and am BACKING EVERYTHING UP AS I TYPE THIS!)

OK, So this started as a question, and ended up solving itself... I must say that this is the only "happy ending" I have ever had with hard drive problems!

For those of you who managed through the whole post, please remember to backup everything!

Also, any recommendations on the easy way to clone a drive?? I am writing off EZ-Drive, but maybe I oculd be talked into trying GHOST again.

Should I boot from a third hard disk, and then clone from non-booting disk to non-booting disk?

Thanks!!!

 

[wolluf]

1. As its new Maxtor drive, I'd probably have used Maxblast to do the transfer.

2. What were you doing with Ghost/which version of Ghost? If you create a Ghost boot disk, you should be able to clone from old to new from dos.

3. Having cloned disk with either Maxblast or Ghost, immediately remove old drive & boot from new on its own.

4. Most important I think - decide on your tool, make sure you are familiar with how it works, plan your job in detail and follow your plan. If something then goes wrong, deal with that, rather than changing tack, in the hope that an updated or different tool will dig you out of the hole.
You don't seem to have ever really decided on the way to go.

 

[rreinman]

Hi
The BIG mistake you made, you said that Ghost was residing on your drive.
You need to boot to a floppy that Ghost is on, then you clone the drive. No auto reboot is req. to complete the cloning. I have used 6.5 and 7.0 and Ghost by far is the easiest and safest to use!
Another thing to watch is most major computer manufactures put a hidden partition on the drive you don't see. This is used for recovery of the system. This will confuse that EZ-Drive program. Not easy!
Ghost has no problem that I am familiar with.

Hope I was of help. Let me know if I hit on something.
Bob

 

[oisnds]

Some drive utilities like EZ-Drive and Maxblast create a single file that contains the "drive". Using Ghost (which works on the file system that is no longer visible) after one of these utilities usually does not come out as good as this situation.