Ghost 2005 - Problem cloning

[RhoXS]

I previously used Ghost 2002 to periodically clone my hard drive as a backup. Ghost 2002 ran from DOS and a floppy and was very reliable. I never had a problem with the cloned drive not being a true bootable clone.

For a number of reasons, using the floppy/DOS method has become much less practical. Norton System Works 2005 has a Windows version of Ghost that supposedly allows me to "Copy One Drive to Another". It states that "it duplicates your drive directly to another drive." I have tried using this on both of our two machines running Windows XP. In both cases the duplication process seems to proceed normally. However, when I test the backup drives, they boot only up to the blue splash screen with the small Windows logo that appears directly after the screen with the moving dots and just before the desktop. At that point nothing else happens.

I am hoping someone has some advice as to how to make this work and create a true clone. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[bcastner]

You need to pull the Master drives, and re-jumper the slave drives as Master.

 

[RhoXS]

Thanks for the suggestion. I do not think the jumpers are the problem because the backup drive has the same jumper configuration as the drive I am backing up. The backup drive is also recognized by the bios when I substitute it and it also seems to boot most of the way top the Desktop. I do not think the bios would even recognize the drive if the jumpers were incorrect.

The drives are all Western Digital serial ATA drives with the jumper in the default "SSC_DIS" position (pins 1-2 directly adjacent to the legacy power connector jumpered).

 

[whitebomber]

I too am experiencing exactly the same problem. I have a 40G and I'm ghosting to 200G. The boot will only go to the point of showing the login screen but no users, shutdown option etc.

Does your original drive have multiple partitions? Mine has two, Win98 (which will boot fine after the clone) and WindowsXP.

I have tried the following with no success:
- Ghost and the utility that came with the drive.
- Turning off the pagefile prior to the ghosting
- Booting from the load CD and doing a repair.
- Disabling the login screen. Then it will let you put in your login information, start to login then immediately go back to the login screen.
- Kept the partition sizes the same as the originals.
- Tried disk to disk. Then also went to image files and back to the disk.

All of the above yields the same results. One additional caveat, if I put the original back in the system as the slave, it will boot from the new drive.

I also tried cloning only the XP partition, both from a partition to partition and a .gho file and in both cases it exhibited the same problem. As stated it boots all the way to the point where you would get the login screen, showing the usernames, and it shows the blue screen with a Windows logo but no login names.

The interesting thing is the machine is up and you can access shares over the network etc, but you can't login.

Hope we can figure this out. One question, does your XP sit at the C: partition?

 

[therip]

I am copying my reply from another post to here because I had this problem and it took me all weekend to resolve. My response was to a posting from Hag, so don't worry that this doesn't match your scenario exactly. Here is my posting:

I had the same problem with Ghost 9.0 and Windows XP, but found a SOLUTION that turned out to be pretty simple (finding the solution was hard, invoking it was easy).

Similar to you, I Ghosted my existing 30 GB drive to my new 80 GB drive and then cabled the drives to make the 80 GB the master and the 30 GB the slave. It booted up just fine and all the files from the old drive seemed to have correctly copied to the new drive. However, I found that the C: drive is still the 30 GB drive and the D: drive is the 80 GB. Huh? So, I unhooked the 30 GB drive and cabled just the 80 GB drive (setting the jumpers correctly, of course). Now on boot up it hung at the initial Windows blue screen and went no further.

I did some exploring on-line and tried fixmbr and fixboot and turning off System Restore. All with no luck. However, from this and other message boards I became convinced that the issue is that the 30 GB drive is "locked" as the C: drive and the 80 GB is locked as the D: drive. Of course, Norton or Windows XP doesn't even talk about this.

Now, here is what I found that worked. Using bryceh79's suggestion, with the 80 GB as the master and the 30 GB as the slave, I booted into Windows (of course, I am booting into the 30 GB drive). From there I modified the registry by running "regedit" from the command line and traversing to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> MountedDevices

Looked for \DosDevices\C: and \DosDevices\D:

I changed these names by right-clicking on the Name, choosing Rename and changing the names as follows:

Renamed \DosDevices\C: to \DosDevices\X: (where X is not a disk drive that is in use).
Renamed \DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\C:
Renamed \DosDeivces\X: to \DosDevices\D:

After booting up, the 80 GB is now correctly the C:\ drive and the 30 GB is the D:\ drive. Just to make sure, I unhooked the 30 GB drive and booted with just the 80 GB drive. It came up with no problems.

I am now using the 30 GB drive as my backup. I assume that I will need to do the same funky stuff if I ever need to restore the data from the 30 GB drive.

Hope this helps as this has caused me tons of grief this weekend. But, persistence does pay off.

Hats off to bryceh79 who pointed me in the direction of changing the registry. Since I had already purchased Ghost 9.0 for this purpose and performed the drive copy and because I was too lazy to go through the MS Backup route, just modifying the registry seemed the least intrusive solution. Luckily, it worked.