Ghost 2003 PC DOS Permanently Hangs

[danielz]

After upgrading my PC to XP Pro from XP Home, I was attempting to restore an image from a DVD using the Ghost interface in Windows, but the PC stops responding after trying to load PC DOS. The PC permanently remains is this state and it can't boot to Windows even after removing the ghost boot disk! I even tried to reinstall the OS, but the boot up process is looking for PC DOS, so I cannot even reload the OS.

I had been successful using the boot disk when the OS was XP Home. The boot disk works perfectly in another XP Pro PC (with a SATA drive too). Both computers are recently home built, both using Asus P4P800 motherboards.
My BIOS is set to load from the floppy drive first, then the DVD ROM drive. The hard drive is SATA and I was sure to run Norton Live Update for Ghost.

Is there a way to interrupt/cancel this PC DOS and just boot to Windows? Attempting to boot into Windows safe mode didn't work.

I'm at the point of removing the drive and formatting externally, and starting from scratch. Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks.

 

[torandson]

Hi,
I had a similar problem with Ghost 2003 on an XP Pro system. Locked up loading and wouldn't go further. If you have a copy of ghreboot.exe you may be able to get back into Windows by running it, but it's a crap shoot. I had no luck with Ghost 2003 and XP because I had a FAT32 partition that was not the C: partition and DOS relettered the drives in a way that was fatal for Norton Ghost 2003. (BTW Ghost is one heckuva registry hog. Good luck if you need to look in there.) After repartitioning to create a DOS FAT16 C: partition and reinstalling the XP Pro OS on another partition formatted FAT32, I was able to get the Ghost PCDOS bootup disk to not freeze. Since then I have reinstalled the OS on an NTFS partition and suspect that with the FAT16 C: partition it will still be okay, but I've run out of patience for trying it. Apparently, Ghost "marks" the drive with "secret" information somewhere, and my only recourse around having even Partition Magic hang and refuse to reformat/repartition a drive that Ghost had got its hands on was to completely zero out the drive with Seatools and start from scratch. I have abandoned Ghost for Paragon Drive Backup 6 which does not do these weird things and have the problems that Ghost does.

I read somewhere about a way to get back into XP by using the installation disk without actually doing the install, but I don't remember where I read it just now. If I find the link, I'll post back. Hope this is helpful.
--torandson

 

[torandson]

Hi again,
I can't find the link I was looking for, sorry.
I seem to remember that there were basically two ways to use the installation CD to try to get back in: one involved using the Recovery Console, and one involved selecting "Install XP" and then opting to have it Repair the existing installation. I tried a bunch of things and got back in once with a message about Windows "finding new hardware" (which I was told to expect) by following instructions I read on the web somewhere, but don't remember exactly what I did just now. Perhaps Google might help, but I've been searching in vain for the last hour and can't find the post that I had read before.

One thing I will caution, though, if you mess around with trying to fix the MBR in the recovery console after Ghost has done its "magic" with the "virtual partiton," and you get a warning that there is something funny about the MBR, pay attention and heed the warning. If you try to restore/fix the MBR at that point you may be kissing it good-bye.

--torandson

 

[torandson]

Hi again,
This isn't the link I was looking for, but it may help.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8356

--torandson

 

[danielz]

Hi torandson,
Thanks for taking the time to investigate my problem, your last link has been helpful, but I'm still stuck.

I can't boot from the CD drive (it is set in BIOS correctly as the second boot device). The Ghost installation CD, which contains Ghreboot.exe, and the XP Pro installation CD both get interrupted by PC DOS failed startup.

Your link pointed me to a "Bootmaster PLUS Windows XP Rescue Disk" which I tried and gotten more information. It launches a DOS menu with two choices

1) Boot to DOS. This attempts to load Free DOS but crashes. I get "Interrupt divide by zero, stack and then bunch of hex characters.

2) Boot to NT. This tell me "NTLDR is missing"

As you said, Ghost has done something funny with the MBR, but fixing it isn't possible yet until I can get a DOS prompt.

If you have any more ideas, I'd appreciate it. For now, I'm going to search the Web.
-danielz

 

[torandson]

danielz,

"As you said, Ghost has done something funny with the MBR, but fixing it isn't possible yet until I can get a DOS prompt."

I strongly suspect that, as a copy-protection/ unauthorized use method, Ghost is **designed** to hang if it sees changes to the system architecture. There is no other reason that I can think of for Ghost to "need" to "mark" our disks before it can do anything with them.

The problem, of course, is that Ghost is slapping its legitimate customers around when they legitimately modify their own drives (duh!) while using it.

I suspect that Ghost is not happy that you have a different OS now than when you first "marked" your drives with it.

I also suspect that there is the possibility that Ghast has rendered your MBR permanently unrecoverable.

You may be able to dowload ghreboot.exe if you can't get it from your CD. Of course, you need a DOS prompt to run it, I understand the problem that much, anyway.

I submit the following conjecture in case it is of any help:

Just a thought off the top of my head, but consider the following scenario:

1a. Paragon PTS DOS 2000 (download, $14.95) contains a Lite version of their Drive Backup which will write an image of a partition to another partition, cutting it into CD-sized chunks if need be.

1b. Paragon Drive Backup 6, full version (download, $49.95) includes "Midnight Commander," a Linux distro that runs from the Bootable Recovery CD entirely in RAM and can read/write/edit both FAT and NTFS partitions, and will write an image to CD. (This should boot on your system even if all the other things you've tried won't.)

(No, I don't work for Paragon) (You can use any other imaging software of your choosing, as long as it doesn't hang while booting.)

2. If your problem is that your C:\ partition (and Ghost's Virtual partition has something to do with it) is NOT a FAT or FAT32 partition (which was my problem), or that Ghost wrote something in the MBR that makes it believe you're trying to set up a production line to clone XP for all your friends and neighbors, and

3. You are willing and able to modify your partitioning scheme, then

4. Resize your C partition puting the unused space ahead of it and create a new FAT16 partition for DOS (200MB should do.) containing the boot sector at the top of the system drive. Of course, this will make your XP system unbootable, but if I understand correctly, it is unbootable now. (If you can, make a backup copy of the boot sector. It might prove useful someday---or at least, interesting.)

5. Make sure you have another partition or free space that can recieve the partition you want to restore.

6. Install some kind of DOS on the new partition. I bought a sealed copy of MS-DOS 6.22 from ebay (which is just a stand-in to give the XP installer something to find on the boot sector. I don't use it.) , but a Win98 recovery disk, or whatever should do the trick. (watch out for the caveat below...)

6. Use the Ghost recovery floppy (which may not hang now, but I don't guarantee this. I've never done this. If you think it might work for you, try this at your own risk.) to run ghost.exe and restore the image you are trying to recover to any convenient partition (a temporary stopping point).

7. Use one of the Paragon products to re-image the partition, either to another partition or to CD. If you can, while your're at it , make an image of the "squeezed" OS partition (the one that used to be drive C, probably D now.)

8.( Perhaps modify the partition scheme again, removing the small DOS partion if you are going to try to revive the existing XP OS, or...) Do a new install of XP to a partition that does not clobber the image you just made or any other partitions you want to keep, while leaving yet another free partition to recieve the image you made in step 7. I'm guessing, BUT I DO NOT KNOW that the XP installation process will "see" the old XP "WINDOWS" directory and allow you to reconnect to it (of course, it won't run if it isn't on the same directory it was originally.) If that is a requirement, you may wish to verify this elsewhere.

9. Restore the step 7 image with the Paragon (or other) prodect.

This is a long thread with a solution that has "DESPERATION" written all over it and the long way around, but it could save your data if all else fails. Of course it presupposes that your system partition is expendable, since you may not be able to make it bootable again, but I don't know, that, too, may be possible.

IF YOU TRY THIS, YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS AND CANNOT CLAIM THAT IT WILL WORK.

Nevertheless, it's my two-cents in case it helps or gives you any better ideas.

At the very least, this method may provide you with a way to transfer all of your Ghost images to Paragon Drive Backup images (or other-brand images) before you wipe the whole drive clean and reinstall your operating system. After that, you can restore the Paragon images to wherever you want them to be. If one of your archived images is the C: partition with the XP OS on it, it won't matter what you do to the Cartition before you restore that image, since the image will overwrite it. Just make sure to set up the partition sizes in the last step the way you want them when all the dust settles. (And you may have to restore your MBR some other way after doing all of this if you restore an image of the original C drive that did not include the MBR. If you have an original image of C which includes the MBR you may be in luck and get everything back the way you want it. The MBR consideration makes this complicated, and I'm losing track of my own suggested scenario here. I don't know what the result would be if a Ghost image of C with the MBR in it were restored to, say E: for example, and then re-imaged by Paragon to a file on F: and then restored to a clean C later. Would the MBR make the trip intact? I don't know. You may need to reconfigure my suggestions to arrive at a solution that will work. Having another drive on hand would allow other possibilities, too, such as restoring from a slave drive to a master system drive, or vice versa, etc. Again, I'm just speculating off the top of my head here in case this gives you any ideas. If you try anything, go with the least-data-destructive/most-proven-back-up-on-hand solutions first and go from there.)

All that having been said ...

The quote below from the following link may be worth looking at. I don't know if it's relevant to your problem or not, but it's relevant to using DOS-based tools on an XP system.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmd_stp_swhw.asp

"If you are not using the NTFS file system, and the system partition is formatted with the file allocation table (FAT16 or FAT32) file system, long file name (LFN) information can be lost if hard disk tools are started from an MS-DOS command prompt. A command prompt appears when using a startup floppy disk or when using the command prompt startup option on multiple boot systems that use FAT16 or FAT32 partitions with Microsoft® Windows® 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2), Microsoft® Windows® 98, or Microsoft® Windows® Millennium Edition (Me) installed. Do not use tools meant for other operating systems on Windows XP Professional partitions."

--torandson


P.S. Yes, I put a little time into answering you. I've received a lot of neck-saving help on this forum, expecially from bcastner. Helping you is just my way of saying "thanks" to him.

 

[torandson]

Hi again,
You might check this thread:

thread779-951306

Might be useful info in your case, I don't know.

--torandson

 

[allteltec]

I would think you would need you SATA drivers on the floppy or ghost could not see your SATA HD. Did This floppy work in this computer with the SATA HD ?

 

[torandson]

Hi again,
You know it just occurred to me that your system should not hang when booting into some form of DOS from a floppy or a CD just because of something that is on your hard drive.

If it is hanging under these circumstances I would look at the contents of the floppy or CD for the problem with not being able to boot into DOS.

For example, is the floppy/CD set up to AUTOMATICALLY load and run ghost.exe? This may be the problem, if it is ghost.exe that is hanging. You could try removing ghost.exe from the recovery CD/floppy and/or modifying the autorun.bat file by removing any reference to ghost.exe.

Second, check to see that all files needed by DOS for stand-alone operation are on the boot floppy/CD. Some of these are hidden, and simply copying them from another medium may not make the floppy/CD bootable. If you have acces to another working system, try making a bootable floppy on that system and using it on the problem system just to see if you can get a DOS prompt. If you try this and cannot get a DOS prompt, I would begin to suspect a hardware problem.

allteltec,
unless the booting OS is on a SATA drive and/or the boot sector of the boot medium is handing off the boot process to an OS that must recognize the SATA drive(s) I wouldn't expect that to cause the system to hang before just booting into DOS. One can always disconnect the SATA drives and/or disable them in BIOS and see if that has any effect on booting from a floppy/CD. As far as I know, Ghost 2003 modifies the boot sector of the system drive so as to boot into its "virtual partition" and then restarts when operations are initiated from within Windows. It is this modification of the boot sector that creates havoc if ghost.exe has any problems when the system restarts. Any attempt to modify the boot sector at this point that does not occur by running ghreboot.exe will likely permanently destroy the boot sector, making a clean install just about the only option.

Does anybody publish a binary and documentation for what a pristine boot sector should contain?

My solution, after the necessary clean install required by Ghost's trouble-causing design, was to create a small FAT16 partition at the top of the drive and install DOS 6.22 into it before installing XP to another partition. Then after XP was installed, I made a sector-by-sector image (NOT using Ghast 2003) of the C partition. This very small image allows me to easily restore the MBR if anything happens to it.

Just another two cents.

--torandson

 

[allteltec]

I agree the boot floppy should not hang unless it is also booting ghost and ghost is hanging. I use ghost 8 corp. plug in for bart pe, I have always goten a good back up or restore and no info is changed on the hard drive that you a ghosting. Bart pe alway reconices my USB 2 and Firewire external HD's.

 

[torandson]

allteltec,
Ah, there it is. No doubt the corporate version of Ghost doesn't mess around with the customer's MBR. Norton wouldn't HAVE any corporate customers if it did. They'd be smart enough to figure out what was going on.
--torandson

 

[danielz]

Hi,
torandson, first I'd like to thank you for taking the time in writing your lengthy responses.

After the nice folks at Bootmaster provided me with a MS-DOS replacement of Free DOS which didn't boot, I reformatted the disk entirely, re-installed XP Pro, and the applications.

At this point, without Ghost even re-installed, I was able to boot from the Ghost startup disk and restore my data! I got a PC DOS prompt and launched Ghost successfully this time.

Previously, I was uncertain why I couldn't boot from the Ghost floppy directly, so I attempted to restore my data from Ghost in the Windows environment and that's where my troubles began when the PC DOS prompt didn't become established.

At this point, I don't think I re-install Ghost and that I'll use Acronis True Image 8.0 for my future backups.

Again, thanks for all your help and I think I found a great place to learn new things about PC software/hardware at Tek Tips Forums.
-danielz

 

[torandson]

danielz,
Thanks for the follow-up. By the way, if you read this, please let me know how well the Acronis product works. I'm curious to know.

I should further comment on my mention of Paragon Drive Backup 6:

The product does not do the sneaky things that Norton Ghost 2003 appears to do, which is a very big plus as far as I'm concerned.

However, I should add that I cannot give an unqualified endorsement of the Paragon product, either.

Actually, the program has a clumsy (stone-age) user interface, incorrectly assigns drive letters (which could be a very serious problem if one is not careful), and is completely blind to my hardware RAID array of basic disks. Worse yet, Paragon has answered NOT A SINGLE ONE of the three tech support emails that I have sent them via their tech support question submission web page. (Which puts them on a par right down there with Symantec.)

I can make PDB6 work for my needs and it's very handy having the self-contained Linux distro on a CD that comes with it.

But lest I gave anyone the impression that I'm enthusiastic about the Paragon product, let me not hesitate to say that it is a rather stinky piece of software. It simply stinks in a more benign way than the Norton product stinks. Norton's product is very sleek and sophisticated. It doesn't stink in that way. But it's a computer owner's worst nightmare waiting to happen for the unwary. And Norton's tech support is as bad as, or worse, than Paragon's, with the unfortunate fact being that northern California is close enough to tempt me into calling them--to no avail, of course. In keeping with the sneaky nature of Ghost 2003, Norton's tech support phone line will happily play music for you and tell you for hours and hours (4 hours, at least; I have not timed it beyond that) that the next tech support representative will be with you shortly... And this is AFTER you have submitted a credit card number and registered online for their "preferred" treatment! (There must be a frayed little wire running from their telephone switchboard, out the window, down the wall, and across the yard to a nearby radio station taking the place of the receptionist that they can't afford to hire.) In light of this, I suppose it's somewhat of a left-handed advantage to their American customers that Paragon is located in Germany. I for one am not at all tempted to try making a phone call. At least their product makes an offline image of a system partion and restores it and apparently does this without peeing all over my slack space and hidden sectors.

So, ...what was the question? ... Oh, yes, how about Acronis?

--torandson

 

[jurgen36]

torandson:
Re Acronis True Image Server. I use the program now for over one year for all my backups. It takes between 6 to 7 minutes to backup or restore 37 Gbytes of data. I have two Sata raid 1 systems on my server. Every night the operating Raid is backed up to the standby array. The next morning the standby array is the active system and so on. As it only takes a few minutes there is virtually no time lost. Once the system is copied the first time, it only takes maybe 30 seconds or so for the incremental backup. Direct disk cloning takes about 7 minutes for 37Gb data. I am extremely happy with Acronics True Image Server. I also made a complete backup to DVD's. However if your drive has bad sectors it changes over to bit copy and then it can take an hour or so. But it still writes usable copy. Regards

Jurgen

 

[Opulent]

I had this error after trying to use Ghost 2003 on my new SATA 74gb HD, the computer wouldn't boot past "Verifying DMI pool data ..." in the end it was simple. Though it is possible to loose all your data if it doesn't work.
I went into the XP Recovery Council and at the recovery prompt typed Fixboot & then FixMBR.

Windows then booted fine.
(It seems that Ghost made a few changes? )

Was very frustrating for a few days.

Hope this helps someone out there.