Norton Ghost Problem

[eboyjones]

Wife bought me a new Dell PC. The first out of the box pc I've ever had. Problem is it came with a 80gb hard drive and I wanted to partition it down for Ghosting a back-up copy. Used Partition Magic 8 and had no problem dividing the remain drive, not including the hiddden restore partiton, to 3 partitions.

I next went into Ghost 2003 and went to Ghost, advanced, clone drive and I get this error message,"unable to find a free MBR slot in the virtual partition DLL. This is usually do to there being no free primary slots left on the boot disk".

I've done this before, but only on systems I fdisked, formatted and installed the operating system and programs.

So I am at a loss. I know I am not that ignorant, but this problem makes me look stupid.

Appreciate your help.

[SolApathy]

Is this a laptop PC? I am not sure about theri desktop PC's, but with the laptops this is a problem because Dell actually has a ghost image already on it. They did this insteaad of continuing to include restore CD's.


Here is where the problem arises.

You are lmited to 4 Primay partitions on a drive.

Dell keeps a tiny 50MB partition at the beginning of the drive that has special diag tools in case you do something dumb and hose your machine. Then they have the Primary drive (C, as well as a Ghost backup drive.

You have 4 "primary" slots available

1- 50MB Diag partition
2- Primary drive (C
3-Ghost backup from Dell

Now when you create an extended patrition with logical drives you are at your limit because an extended partition counts as a "Primary" with MBR. (master boot record)

Norton requires that you have at least 1 free slot for Ghost to work.

I would suggest you delete the Dell backup, remove the partition, and then resize the drives accordingly.

Then let ghost do it's thing.

[eboyjones]

Thanks SolApathy, you sent me in the right direction. For whatever reason when I repartitioned my drive with Partition Magic it or I left 8mb of unalloted storage, which was set as a primary drive. I resized my new partition to include this unalloted storage and was left with only three primaries whick allowed me to Ghost my C:\ drive.

Your point about Dell not including a restore disk with a Latop was correct as we bought a new laptop along with this new dektop PC. I called Dell and complained and they immediately sent me one out for free.

But the interesting thing is I also wanted to repartition the Laptop but before I repartitioned with Partition Magic, it showed there was 7mb of unalloted storage that was set as a primary. So I resized as I did my desktop and Ghosted with no problem.

Wonder why Dell would leave unalloted space and make it primary?????

So to be safe, as I now didn't trust ither drive with all my programs and data I had a 40gb USB drive that I partitioned and Ghosted both PC's onto it just for safe keeping.

But again thanks a lot for saving me a lot of aggrevation!!!!!!