Windows XP won't boot after Ghosting

[TheOverlord]

I had a 40gb drive fail and sent it in for RMA. In the interim I used an old 10gb drive and installed XP Pro on it along with all my normal software apps.

I just got my new 40gb drive and am trying to just clone the 10gb over to it so that I don't have to go thru the whole install process again. I am trying to ghost the data over to a 15gb primary partition on the 40gb drive.

The ghosting itself goes along fine. Then I turn off the computer pull out the 10gb, rejumper the 40gb as master and boot up the computer. XP Pro loads all the way to the welcome screen then hangs there with only the windows logo but none of the usual usernames that are listed. At this point even a three finger salute does nothing.

I've been reading thru FAQs and Googling for an hour now and can't seem to find anyone who has this exact issue. Any thoughts?

 

[redbeard1]

For some reason, XP doesn't like being ghosted(?) to a partition. If you do it drive to drive instead of partition to partition, it should work. That doesn't get your smaller partition though.

 

[tiap]

I've had problems too. The easiest way is to clone the drive and then partition it later to the sizes you want. Then image it again for backups. Not sure but I think it has something to do with serials etc in xp. In 98 it used to work flawlessly

 

[13black]

You should be able to download software to clone the drive right from the drive makers site. Maxtors Maxblast, or Western Digitals data lifegaurd come to mind.

 

[corkyg]

Tiap has it - ghosting and cloning are not the same thing. Cloning duplicates every thing on a drive exactlky where it belongs, such the boot sector. Ghosting is merely making an image of a drive for backup purposes, and does not necessarily place it where it has to be for booting.

I clone my drives on 3 computers weekly - each has a duplicate drive - then I rotate them - that is a quick backup that also extends the time lines of the drives in real terms.

The best cloning (and imaging) software I have found to date is Acronis' TrueImage 7. Norton Ghost sucks by comparison.

 

[tiap]

Hey corky-g
I've been using ti7 as well. Much more serious than norton. Acronis partiton expert is great too. Hurray for non-bloatware

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: redbeard1
For some reason, XP doesn't like being ghosted(?) to a partition. If you do it drive to drive instead of partition to partition, it should work. That doesn't get your smaller partition though.

I too suggest ghosting the drive rather than the partition - you'll get the MBR and all other required information. Ghost will still let you change partition sizes though - no problems with that, either.

 

[Netopia]

Yeah, I have to agree with redbeard1 and dclive..... the easies thing for you to do is to use Ghost do to a:

Local -> Drive -> From Image

After choosing the image file and the destination drive, just change the size of the target partition to be created on the 40GB to 15384MB and go forward with the Ghosting. Doing so will give you your 40GB with a single Primary Partition and the rest left empty to do with as you please.

Joe

 

[niall]

I've had similar problems of trying to copy OS information to another hard drive without success - and this in Win98SE.

To be absolutely clear, while using NortonGhost language:

- You should do a disk to disk clone, and not a partition to partition clone? (I think the OP was talking of the latter, just taking the 10gig as a single partition to the 15gig partition on the 40gig drive)

I tried that myself, and wound up with a problem: while Ghost allowed me to resize the 3 partitions on the larger destination disk, and made no errors during the copying, after reboot I could only see the primary and one logical drive of the extended partition; the last drive was invisible, unusable in anything but Ghost itself (which could see it fine). This despite the Ghost manual itself showing an identical (3 parts) setup for its example of disk-to-disk cloning.

- Alternatively, once could do a disk to image backup, and not partition to image backup?

- It seems using drives in Ghost will format as well as partition the destination drive, then?

 

[dclive]

Just do drive to drive (or drive to image, for backup purposes) and you'll be all set.

 

[Tom45S]

I tried using Acronis' TrueImage (V7) to Clone a laptop's 15G XP hard drive to a 20G device and the laptop won't even begin to boot the new drive. To do the copy, I moved both drives to an XP desktop, booted from the desktop's HD and then ran TrueImage to Clone the laptop drive (containing 2 partitions with a total of 2 logical drives) to the target. I didn't resize, just did a straight clone.

I suspect that maybe the fact that the desktop set the drives to available drive letters Source (P and S), Dest (R and V) may have caused a problem when the laptop later saw the "sticky" drive letters. But, I still can't get this to work and I am certainly puzzled. Have you ever attempted such an operation where a second machine was used as the OS for the clone?

Basically, the laptop blips the drive and just sits there with it's cursor blinking. It's as if the drive partition is not active or some such situation. Any ideas?

Tom

 

[13black]

Originally posted by: Tom45S
I tried using Acronis' TrueImage (V7) to Clone a laptop's 15G XP hard drive to a 20G device and the laptop won't even begin to boot the new drive. To do the copy, I moved both drives to an XP desktop, booted from the desktop's HD and then ran TrueImage to Clone the laptop drive (containing 2 partitions with a total of 2 logical drives) to the target. I didn't resize, just did a straight clone.

I suspect that maybe the fact that the desktop set the drives to available drive letters Source (P and S), Dest (R and V) may have caused a problem when the laptop later saw the "sticky" drive letters. But, I still can't get this to work and I am certainly puzzled. Have you ever attempted such an operation where a second machine was used as the OS for the clone?

Basically, the laptop blips the drive and just sits there with it's cursor blinking. It's as if the drive partition is not active or some such situation. Any ideas?

Tom

The drive letters shouldn't matter, they aren't tied (sticked) to the drive. The laptop will assighn it a new drive letter. Don't take this the wrong way but are you sure you cloned the drive and didn't just creat an image file on the new drive? If you put the drive back in your desktop PC you can use diskmanagement to see if the partition is marked active.

 

[redbeard1]

I've some had trouble with acronis doing multiple partition drives before. One of them was a dual boot drive and after a bunch of fooling around I switched to 7tools partition manager. It worked perfectly.

 

[tiap]

Acronis makes a partiton manager prog called partition expert that works great for me. I usually image a drive, then clone the 1st drive to the 2nd, then reimage the first drive with the first image, then manage the drive with partition expert.

 

[13black]

This is one that I use, Bootstar. It's small, easy to use, and can be run from a floppy. It will let you hide partitions too, so that no matter wich OS you boot too it always shows up as C:\.