Ghosting a laptop?

[THE4MAN]

I've been using Norton Ghost for almost 4 years now to back-up my Win98 home system using multiple drives - easy...

But I just got a new laptop that's running WinXP and I'll be damned if I can get things to work right. I've never partitioned a drive before, but figured I'd need to since the laptop only has one HD. So I managed to reinstall XP on my system and create a new NTFS partition for backups and Ghost images. Formatted the partition and can move files back and forth between partitions with no problem.

I'm now using Norton Systemworks 2002 for the laptop but here's the 2 problems I've run into...
1. I can't get Ghost to let me select my new partition to write to because it's "NTFS Extended". It shows the main partition as NTFS and the smaller partition as NTFS extnd and gives me an error when I try to select it. On subesequent tries, I don't even get the error, it just won't even let me select that 2nd partition at all. Game over.

2. I try and write the Ghost image directly to the internal CDR drive. I select the span option so it will split the files across multiple CDRs and I get notification that the process will take 8 CDRs when I attempt the process. The first CDR burns for about 8 minutes (12% process indicator) then tries to close the session and gives me an error that it's unable to close and stops the process. I've tried different CDR media types- same result. I've tried making different versions of the Ghost boot disk using PC-DOS and MS-DOS - same result.

Is there anyway to make that second partition just NTFS instead of NTFS extnd? I'm wondering if Ghost will allow me to access the drive then and let me write to it? Did I mess something up in the partitioning or formatting process to cause this problem?

And what's up with the CDR problem? It's obviously able to recognize the drive and write *something* to it, just not able to close it.

I'd be really grateful if anyone has suggestions for me. Thanks a lot for your time.

Dave Fore

 

[smah]

I don't use Ghost so I don't know if this will be helpful or not. Make sure that your using the current version of Ghost including any recent patches/updates - many older disk utilities aren't compatible with XP. Second thought - would you have any better luck if your extended partition was Fat32? XP can read and write Fat32 without any problems. Unfortunately, unless you have Partition Magic or something, you'll probably have to reinstall again to change that second partition.

 

[WParsons]

Ghost 2002 will not write to the NTFS partition.
Ghost 2003 will do this. (Couldn't believe it until I tried it myself. Works really well)

You have two options.
1. Make the second partition FAT32.
2. Upgrade to Ghost 2003.

Hope this helps.

 

[wolluf]

You can use XP's partitioning tools to remove second partition and recreate it as FAT32 (Disk Management - part of Computer Management or run diskmgmt.msc)