Can't boot into Windows due to Norton Ghost Clone

[muohiostudent]

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I tried to change out the hd on my XP system using Norton Ghost but to no avail. I installed a second hd; ghosted the partition on the first drive to the second drive. Removed the first drive and made the new drive the primary. The system starts and then hangs on the logon screen just before it gives you the list of users. I can access the drive from another computer on the network running Windows 98 so I know it's booted up. But I cannot get logged on to this system. If I leave BOTH hd in the system, even though the original boot drive is now a slave drive, the sytem will boot. Take the original boot drive out, and I can't log on.
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This same thing happend to except i was a moron... I formated my original. It wouldn't let me format through windows because it said the drive was in use so i did it through partition magic. Now when i start my cpu it automatically attempts to run windows and hangs right before the log in screen. I don't even get the screen that lets me choice whether or not i want to boot into Linux or one of my two windows operating systems. I don't know what to do. I tried throwing in an Xp pro disk and repairing it with that as others have done successfully. When I put the cd in and hit install it saw that i had my xp home edition but it didn't give me a choice to repair it as it usually does. It is possible that its because I have Xp home and not Xp pro. I will test my Xp home disk as soon as i can find it. If that doesn't work though, i have no idea what i am going to do. When i get to the safe mode screen there is a choice that i can restore my computer to recent settings that previously worked. But i don't know what will happen if i do that. I am hoping I will be able to just do a simple repair and have it all fixed. Does anyone have any other solutions to this or know whether or not the xp home addition cd repair will work or not?
Any help would be EXTREMELY Appreciated
Thanx in Advance.

 

[corkyg]

When you say "Ghost" what do you mean? Most people use that term to mean creating an image of one drive on another. But - that will not be bootable in most cases.

What you need to make is a complete bit-by-bit copy of the drive so that the MBR and boot sector, etc., are in the correct location.

Symantec Ghost can do it, but the absolute best is Acronis TrueImage 8 - it has a CLONE button on the interface.TrueImage

 

[muohiostudent]

I wish i could redu the clone. But like i said I deleted my original and as of now i can't even boot into ANY operating system on my cpu. I was told however that I should be able to clone a complete primary drive with norton ghost (operating system and all). Anyone have personal experience with this and have any fixes? I am still working on getting my xp home edition cd.

Thanx for the reply and Thanx in advance for your help

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: muohiostudent
I wish i could redu the clone. But like i said I deleted my original and as of now i can't even boot into ANY operating system on my cpu. I was told however that I should be able to clone a complete primary drive with norton ghost (operating system and all). Anyone have personal experience with this and have any fixes? I am still working on getting my xp home edition cd.

Thanx for the reply and Thanx in advance for your help

Yes. And you should be able to clone the complete op sys along with other apps and have it be a fully bootable HDD.

I don't due XP (I'm on a mix of 98se, ME and 2000pro) but have read that when cloning XP care must be taken. Apparantly (from what I have read) when XP is cloned one HD must be removed b4 booting. The article said it was reported by users of XP that after cloning XP has a problem when it boots and sees two identicle HDDs, it will try to repair the install and ends up hosing it.

I beleive the article I read this in was the "radified guide" to cloning. I 'll try to find a link so you can have a look.

Fern

EDIT: HERE'S the link. I think the XP is several pages back towards the end of the article

 

[Fern]

It's page 8 of the guide I linked above:

Your section on Cloning makes no mention of removing the newly created drive from the system. Failure to do so before rebooting will annihilate your registry.

We were moving an OS to a second drive. When cloning, you must remove the cloned drive before rebooting into Windows. Windows will look at the system, scan the registry, realizes its duplicated and deems it's corrupt. Then it creates a new, blank registry, and carries on with that. I tried restoring the registry from the command prompt, but alas nothing. Live and learn.

In response to Les' comment above, Bob Davis writes to say:

This is true only with the NT-based OS's, not Win98SE and presumably similar OS's (Win95, Win98, ME). I always have a fully cloned drive in my system (D, running Win98SE, and have never experienced adverse effects from doing so in about two years using Ghost.

To supplement my weekly ghosting of three rotated HD's mounted in mobil racks, I run a daily batch file with Windows Task Scheduler that updates important files to D:. This includes business databases, OE DBX's, WAB, etc. This system has been the best backup method I've found in 20 years of computing, and has bailed my butt out of trouble more than once.

Don't know if this is relevent for all versions of Ghost.

Good thing I re-read this. Haven't Ghosted with my win2k install yet. Looks like it has the same prob as XP.

Fern

 

[Tarrant64]

At my job we 'attempted' a lot of ghosting with Norton and XP systems and a lot of times it was more trouble than it was worth. Now, while reading your first post I was thinking that if you were having troubles installing everything you could try Repairing the OS. If any of the files were damaned in your windows directory you can boot from your WinXP CD, then when it prompts you do go to the repair prompt or whatever and to press R, DON'T, and continue install like normally. Another screen should come up saying something about a damaged file or directory, and will option for you to repair. It will delete all the files and reinstall them, leaving all your logins and personal files intact.

After reading some more posts, how did you go about cloning the drive with Ghost? Did you use sysprep or anything?

 

[avey]

I've been building my companies standard ghost images since the NT4 days. For quite a while now we have been on Windows XP.

I think some earlier versions of ghost had trouble with XP. Maybe pre Ghost 6.5 or 6.0. Right now we're using Ghost 7.5. I know 7.0 also worked fine for XP.

If you did the image as partition to partition then it probly didnt grab the MBR.

With default setting set a disk to disk image will copy over the MBR and everything. I?ve done this many times upgrading systems to larger disks.

Like Tarrant64 said. At this point I think your only option would be to attempt a windows repair. Otherwise backup the data and reinstall.

 

[muohiostudent]

To respond to Tarrant64, I didn't prepare for the ghost in any other way then following nortons steps.

I don't know if this will help but at first when i tried to reformat my old hardrive (I moved it to the slave and booted off the new one) I got an error that said I can't format it because it is in use. It said that when i did it through cmd and My Computer. So I used partition magic to format the drive and partition magic restarted my computer to do it and that was the first time that my computer wouldn't boot up. It goes into windows and right after windows loads up (the big screen that says Windows xp with the loading bar) I get a screen that says the format is complete and it goes to the login screen and right before it gets there it freezes.

I also tried taking out my old hard drive and changing my bios setting of primary 1 to off instead of auto and it still doesn't boot.

I already had my xp home cd sent out to me, hopefully i will have it by saturday. If that doesn't work, like avey said, i think my only option is to put in my old hd and and install xp on that and take my files from my new hd that are important. I hope i am not left with this option because that would mean installing all of my programs over again

Thanx for the help guys, I hope this new information helps

 

[muohiostudent]

I am glad to say that I am typing this msg from my cpu! I got an xp home cd and it found my old operating system and repaired it. Everything isn't working though, some of my programs don't work. For example Macafee, Zone Alarm, and CounterStrike source. Is there anyway to get these to work without reinstalling them?

thanx

 

[obes2k]

Sounds like your registry was wiped out. If you dont have a backup of your old registry, then yea, you'll likely need to reinstall them.

 

[montag451]

If it is a registry wipeout,
Do a search for
system.dat
and
user.dat

Make a copy of the ones you find that are recent, but before the problem arose.
Copy them to another folder on your hdd [just so you do have a copy],
boot into recovery mode,

rename the following files:
winxp [or wherever your WINDOWS folder is]/system.dat
to
system.ddd

and

winxp [or wherever your WINDOWS folder is]/user.dat
to
user.ddd

now copy the copies you made earlier to your windows folder,
make sure they are called
SYSTEM.dat and USER.dat
reboot
see if that does anything

 

[muohiostudent]

Thanx, I fixed that problem. I just installed norton ghost again and they have a thing that searches all your files and changes all files that start with c: to e: (or any origional drive to a new drive). I did that and my programs are working fine. The only problem now is i get an error msg when i turn on my computer that says:

Error in E:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\NVMCTRAY.DLL
Missing entry:NVTASKBARINIT

I get that error and my Macafee shows on my tool bar with a red crossed out circle and my zone alarm doesn't start up at all. However when i go to programs and start zone alarm up like that it works fine. So i went into msconfig and under startup it shows my zone alarm with a c: instead of an e:. Is there a way that i can change the c: to an e: without reinstalling zone alarm?

thanx again for the help

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Fern
Don't know if this is relevent for all versions of Ghost.
Good thing I re-read this. Haven't Ghosted with my win2k install yet. Looks like it has the same prob as XP.
Fern

Well, it's true for both Ghost 2002 and 2003, and W2K and XP (really, all modern NT-based OSes I'm pretty sure). It's the one big "gotcha" with HD cloning/Ghosting. After you ghost to another HD, remove the original HD, before attempting to boot either. If both HDs are in the machine when booting, or you switch the new drive (with the freshly-cloned OS) to Master and attempt to boot off of that with the old OS drive still hooked up, you'll hose things pretty good. At that point, even if you remove the old OS drive and try to boot again, the freshly-cloned installation will have already been corrupted. I learned that the hard way.

 

[muohiostudent]

For some reason my internet goes off after like 15 minutes but the wierd thing is I still have internet if that makes sense. Basically whenever i search the web it says can't find server just like im offline but i can still connect to aim and play games online. But then if i restart my cpu i can go on the internet again for about 15 minutes. Does anyone know what is wrong? Also when i right click on start menu and go to explore my icons next to all the files are not there. For example on my computer it doesn't show a computer, there is just nothing there, it just says +My Computer. Any help for these problems or the ones posted above would be greatly appreciated.

Thanx for the help