Ghost 2003 messed up my boot

[Connoisseur]

Guys, I recently did a fresh install of XP Sp2 on my home desktop. After installing all the updates, I decided to take a clean ghost image of the HD. I had a Ghost 2003 boot disk lying around so I did the "Partition" to "Image" option and successfully created a ghost image. But when I restarted the machine, it gave me a "Boot from CD" even though I had the bios go to the HD's and then a "DISK BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISC AND PRESS ENTER". It freezes at this point. I found out that the only way I can get back into my install of xp is to have the bios boot of the CD ROM drive first and have my XP SP2 install cd in the drive. Then for some reason, I can boot into my clean windows install just fine.

Has anyone heard of this issue? It's driving me nuts. I JUST did a fresh install and Ghost seems to have screwed me. I'm not sure if this is a possible cause, but my boot drive is actually drive F. Due to the way my HD's are set up in the IDE channels, the data storage drives were allocated C, D and E and the system partition was allocated F.

My system Information is below:
Opteron 165
TYAN S2865 with Latest NForce drivers
2GB ddr2
C Drive (Physical Drive 200GB)
D Drive (Physical Drive 200GB)
E Drive (Physical Drive 250GB)
F Drive (Logical Partition 60GB; Boot partition) (SATA Drive but comes up as IDE Channel 2)
H Drive (Logical partition 250GB)
DVD-RW Drive
SB Audigy

 

[MichaelD]

It sounds like your MBR (Master Boot Record) got screwed up. The fact that you have screwed up drive letters is a tip-off. WinXP is really stupid w/the install. If you have another drive attached, it will put the Boot and System files on different partitions. This can screw things up.

You could boot from the WinXP CD and go to Recovery Console and type FIXMBR and see if that works...it might. But your partitons will still be all screwed up. This except problem has happened to me...it sucks, I know.


If I were you here's what I'd do.

Boot into Windows however you can
Rename all your storage partitions on the other HDs to "high letters" like M, N, O, etc
Shut down
UNPLUG all other HDs except the one you want to install WinXP on
Run WinXP install setup
Make sure to install to the C: partition; you may need to repartition this HD so back up the data before proceeding w/the install
Finish WinXP install
Shut down
Reconnect all HDs
Boot up and rename the partitions on the other drives to whatever Drive Letters you want
Make new Ghost image being very careful not to overwrite any needed data

 

[Connoisseur]

Thanks. That's exactly what I did but I haven't re-ghosted the drive. I now have only 1 drive installed (C Boot/Logical Partition and D Logical Partition). I'm wondering if i Ghost the C drive whether or not it'll mess up the MBR again. Installing windows is long and tedious.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: Connoisseur
Thanks. That's exactly what I did but I haven't re-ghosted the drive. I now have only 1 drive installed (C Boot/Logical Partition and D Logical Partition). I'm wondering if i Ghost the C drive whether or not it'll mess up the MBR again. Installing windows is long and tedious.

If you delete all the partitions from that drive and create just the boot/system partition in the Windows Setup, you'll be golden. Deleting all the partitions erases any MBR that may be there. You might as well start from scratch "the right way." 🙂 That way, you KNOW for a fact that you won't have any issues later.