Can't boot into correct partition

[yaffle]

Having recently built my new machine, I finally finished installing everything I needed, updating the OS, fixing driver issues, and generally getting the thing working well. So I decided to back up my c: drive, installed Norton Ghost 2003, and told it to clone my SATA RAID0 array (2xspinpoint 160gb drives) onto my spare IDE drive.

Ghost reboots to DOS, starts to clone, and crashes. It offers me three options; retry (which simply restarts the cloning process and crashes in the same place again), drop to DOS or reboot to Windows. Rebooting to Windows doesn't work - it simply reboots the computer into the Ghosting process again, where it crashes and offers me the same three options. Dropping to DOS puts me into the C: drive, which scared me to death as the c: drive was blank except for the ghost executables and a few text files and stuff; I thought it had wiped my c: drive.

After a bit of digging I discovered that Ghost has set up a new FAT partition on my RAID array, and is booting into that FAT partition. This means that I can't get access from bootup into any of my NTFS partitions, including my windows installation. Not having yet had the chance to set up rescue disks (Which was to be my next step after cloning :roll: ) I decided to try and re-install Win2k on my spare IDE drive, so I could at least see what remained of my SATA windows installation. I've now successfully installed win2k on my spare drive, and I can see that everything is intact on my SATA drives, and my original windows partition has been moved to g:, with the new FAT ghost partition as c:

This means that I can at least rescue my photos, emails, documents etc. from my drive, but I'd really like to be able to boot into my old windows install rather than have to go to the effort of setting everything up again. Is there any way of making my RAID array boot into my old partition instead of the new Ghost FAT partition?

 

[zimu]

here's what i'd do
boot up into win2000
install partition magic and set the partition with your old OS as active.

then modify your boot.ini to tell it to boot your old OS rather than the new one, you'll have to fiddle with the drive/partition settings in boot.ini to make the computer find the right partition.

you're luck you have that many drives. although at the same time its because you have so many drives you're having this problem

 

[Fern]

I could be mistaken here, but some Ghost guides on the net caution/report that the clone feature can cause probs on XP. Specifically, when "cloning" (not ghosting), you must remove one of the HDs b4 rebooting. Otherwise it is reported that winXP "gets confused" when it sees two bootable partitions and attempts to do a repair, fouling up both. I don't run XP so can't confirm.

I realize this may not help rectify the current situation, but if correct will help you (and others) avoid the problem in the future.

Good Luck with it.

Fern

 

[bobster]

You need to get a file called "ghreboot". Save it to a floppy. Boot off a Win98 boot disk to a command prompt. Run the ghreboot off the floppy. Do a google search to find the ghreboot file.