[RESOLVED] Ghost is killing me!

[TangleWeb]

All I want to do is copy drive A to drive B, remove drive A & boot to drive B and live happily ever after.

It should be easy & I should be able to do it, but alas cannot.

I have Norton SystemWorks 2006 with Ghost. I performed a drive copy using the “Copy Drive Wizard”. I checked “Set Drive as Active” & “Copy MBR”. When I removed the original drive, jumpered the new drive as master & power the system on, I get to the point that Windows starts to load & it just sits at the Blue screen with the Windows logo forever.

What am I doing wrong?

~Dave

[Gabriel]

Have you changed controller?
IDE->Sata
IDE->SCSI
etc.?

Have you tried booting in safe mode?

Gabriel

[confus-ed]

[begin too much coffee moment] ...err, A & b are always reserved as floppy drive names by any x86 style bios so you are making me most confus-ed !

C is always the boot drive (well it could be some later letter if you really wanted, but never a, or b anyway).[end rant !]

I dunno what went wrong, sounds like you did it right to me - have you checked symantec's KB?

What about safe mode or last known good ? Any different ..?

I'd have thought a repair would fix you up if you aren't too bothered about what went amiss, but that may cause you issue with installed stuff, mostly though its reasonably painless.

[TangleWeb]

[begin too much coffee moment] ...err, A & b are always reserved as floppy drive names by any x86 style bios so you are making me most confus-ed !

C is always the boot drive (well it could be some later letter if you really wanted, but never a, or b anyway).[end rant !]

I dunno what went wrong, sounds like you did it right to me - have you checked symantec's KB?

What about safe mode or last known good ? Any different ..?

I'd have thought a repair would fix you up if you aren't too bothered about what went amiss, but that may cause you issue with installed stuff, mostly though its reasonably painless.

Sorry for the confusion about drive letters! I used “A” & “B” just to identify the “Source” & “Destination” drive. I can see how that would be confusing.

I had the “Source” drive (“C:\”) as master on the primary with an optical drive as slave. I connected the “Destination” drive as master on the secondary to make the copy.

I had no luck with Ghost, but someone on another forum mentioned a program called “BootIT NG”, so I downloaded a trial version, created a bootable CD & was successful in copying the drive.

This program allows you to copy one drive to another, remove the original & boot to the new drive. The only requirement is that you install “BootIT NG” on the new drive initially to make it bootable, then you can remove it. The whole process is very quick & easy, once you get it down.

I will be purchasing this program since besides this copy function, it also has the ability to create bootable “Restore CD sets”, a very useful feature. It has a laundry list of other features including setting up a multi-boot environment.

Have you changed controller?
IDE->Sata
IDE->SCSI
etc.?

Have you tried booting in safe mode?

Gabriel

I had not changed anything, was simply trying to copy one drive to another & have it work in the same machine. It didn’t even get to the point where you select safe mode. It didn’t even see Windows at all, simply said No OS found.

Fortunately, I found a nice solution.

Thanks for the help!

~Dave

[confus-ed]

Glad you sussed it , 'full ghost' is supposed to do all of that, but many of the bundled software versions are cut down & just don't work as they should all the time..

[Poseidon]

Glad you worked it out.
FYI - instead of selecting to copy the master boot record, you should have checked - make drive bootable. This problem was first introduced with DriveImage 7 before Symantec bought them out.
The only time I recomend using the copy mbr switch is with two idential drives.

[confus-ed]

...should have checked - make drive bootable..

I'll try & remember that - but honestly I'd have thought “Set Drive as Active” would be the same !

I guess somebody at symantec still needs lessons in how the MBR sequence goes & to get fixing their 'wizard' so that its a bit more comprehendable..