Another Recovery Question

[gkanders]

Ok, so my father had a Thinkpad R51e. His harddrive failed, won't even spin up.
Fortunately, he had ghost and had a backup. Unfortunately, he didn't have a full disk image, so he has no recovery partition.

We bought a new HDD, and restored from the ghost backup, but it still has no OS found.

Do you think A FIXMBR command would work? Not sure if it would since there was no MBR on there to fix, or if the ghost restore is in the right place, etc.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Greg

 

[Bozo Galora]

While I build my own from scratch, I am aware of "store bought" configs.
OEMs, depending on year and manuf, may have driver partitions, partial restore partitions, full restore partitions, and/or full O/S partitions.
Mostly now, full O/S parts are gone and the O/S CD's offered as an option are not included, may charge $10 for XP Pro disk by request
Your big prob is that some/most of these partitions are HIDDEN - not even seen after boot, only accessible by related factory CD.
I doubt that Ghost would copy these in their image
Using Ghost with a factorybuilt makes no sense, since there are min of 3 ways to backup everything anyways
However, dead HDD means no chance of recov orig config WITH ultilty partitions.
You will need to call and get info on how to get new HDD reloaded to original partitions or treat new HDD as "start from scratch" homebuilt.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-61596.html

As a matter of fact, Ghost or PM would prob create a dynamic partition being unable to reconcile space availability.
I am unsure as to what you did restore to new HDD, if you got no O/S and assuming one big "C" partition

As an outside chance you could try GetDataBack 3.67 NTSF, but it always comes back to the issue of factory non traditional partitions.

Just FWIW, in OEM situations, I would use a true data/OS cloner like Casper which does NOT image, instead of Ghost-TrueImg-PartitionTragic

 

[BarrySotero]

Do you have number key for OS? If you have that key you can just borrow someone elses disk if its of same OS you had (xp home to xp home etc.). Any disk can get you to point where you enter OS key. I just did it today with IBM desktop. I had key on machine case but no OS disks. I pulled out XP disks that came with my Gateway and installed Windows. To activate I called MS on phone and gave them key off of IBM case. Now I am in biz again on this hot, old Pentium 4 3.2

 

[pcgeek11]

I had a similar problem this week with a ghost backup someone had made for their PC and they couldn't get it to work. I found that it was a Dell PC and the Boot.ini file showed that it was looking to boot from "partition 2" and they had only ghosted the OS partition. A simple fix is to change the Boot.ini file to read " partition 1 " or create a small primary partition 1 then restore the Ghost Image to the remaining free space.

Before Editing:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

After Editing:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

pcgeek11