Ghosting Vista Drives

**glenglenn** · May 14th, 2008, 10:41 AM

Hi Guys,

I guess out here in the hinterlands it takes a while to get around to it, but I finally had my first experience at ghosting a &%$#@*&^!!! Vista, hard drive, or maybe I should say using Symantec's &%$#@!! new Ghost program (with Symantec software, you inevitably have some error message and some elegant solution they want you to run instead of them fixing their &^%$#!! problem software).

Anyway, I downloaded their trial version of Ghost Solution 2.5 and made a boot CD with Windows PE to start the computer with, and ran the ghost program (up to now, I've been using 2003 with all OS up to XP, reliable and trustworthy). When I ran Ghost, it reported, right away mind you, not after looking at a good deal, or any, of the drive, that "bad blocks were encountered on read". Now normally, I would suspect the drive itself, but evidently, upon googling this, it could be a problem with the new Ghost program and the way it accesses a drive, and that you can edit the ghost executable with a switch or two to force it to access the drive in other ways. I told ghost to ignore the "bad blocks" and finished out creating the drive image. So now, I don't really know if there are problems with the hard drive, like I would normally suspect (the factory recovery from the recovery partition, wherein formatting would mark any bad sectors and install Windows on only good ones, seems to be going quite nicely), or if there are different versions of ghost with different ways of accessing the drives with different switches on the executable built in, and that this is the actual problem. Update: Spoke too soon, the format went OK, but the recovery of data is stuck at 30% now for the last 15 minutes, so that may indicate a problem with the data/hard drive at the source image file, or the destination user partition.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I just ordered an OEM disk of Ghost Solutions 2.0, just to able to image &%$#@!!! Vista, drives...

**glenglenn** · May 14th, 2008, 10:53 AM

As a followup to the above question, can I format a hard drive in preparation for imaging Vista to it, using XP Professional Computer Management/Disk Management? Is Vista NTFS still the same as XP NTFS?

**arch0nmyc0n** · May 14th, 2008, 11:30 AM

I haven't used Ghost on Vista stuff yet. We switched to Acronis and have yet to have issues with it. We've copied Vista drives with it successfully. In fact, I'm finding more and more people have been abandoning Ghost. However, specifically about your problem I don't see why Ghost (at least the older one) would have a problem copying a Vista installed drive. My understanding is the file system is the same as XP. Of course I might be wrong, but I'd run the manufacturers diagnostics on yer drive just to be sure, then you know it's not your drive.

**Guts3d** · May 14th, 2008, 11:51 AM

In the original image type this at a cmd prompt:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot

bcdedit /set {default} device boot

bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

This will allow older versions as well as new Ghost® to work fine with Vista.

**glenglenn** · May 14th, 2008, 11:56 AM

Hi, and thanks!

Acronis looks interesting. I was just reading a review of it at Amazon, and noticed that according to this one individual, Acronis does not support SATA drives. Is there anything to this that you know of? Maybe they just had a motherboard that didn't by default without having to enter a SATA driver (as in Windows OS install at F6). If this is required, does Acronis allow for the installation of this driver in such situations?

This particular computer I am working on does indeed have a SATA hard drive.

**glenglenn** · May 14th, 2008, 01:11 PM

Originally Posted by Guts3d

In the original image type this at a cmd prompt:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot

bcdedit /set {default} device boot

bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

This will allow older versions as well as new Ghost® to work fine with Vista.

Thank you. Are refering to each .gho image file, or the ghost.exe of the program? Can you elaborate a bit?

**Guts3d** · May 14th, 2008, 02:13 PM

Start the computer that contains the image you want to Ghost, hit Start, Accessories, run, cmd. In the resulting box, type in the above. It will tell you that it ran sucessfully. One done with all three, shut down and Ghost as usual. It should work for you, I have tried it on 40 or so Ghost images for Vista ranging from Dells to Microns.

**glenglenn** · May 14th, 2008, 02:30 PM

Thanks for that. I usually have several images on the computer from having ghosted a half dozen drives or so before I clean them off. Will this command line be applied to each image file?

Oh, I wasn't thinking too clearly (we got hit by a tornado last Frdiay). What I am having a problem with is when I am creating an image. I typically slave the drive to be imaged on my bench computer, and start the computer with the ghost standard boot floppy disk, and use the existing master hard drive as destination for the drive image. The slave drive in this case being a hard drive loaded with Vista, I got the bad blocks on read error message (at least I assume this was the reason, it may still turn out that the drive itself is bad, but it's unusual to get the message the instant you start to ghost and not into the process a bit). So I would have no opportunity to do the command line on an existing image as you suggest, as it would not yet have been created.

**slgrieb** · May 14th, 2008, 05:49 PM

I've been using True Image 10 and 11 for some time, and don't have problems with either. The software certainly does support SATA. I've seen some commentary that suggests 11 breaks file sharing on some networks, but I've never seen it. The cloning utility works flawlessly, and restoring a backup is simple. So far, it's worked fine for me and my clients under both XP and Vista.

**Ferrit** · May 14th, 2008, 07:00 PM

Using Ghost 12 with Vista and it is working just fine.
I looked at Ghost solutions 2 quite some time back and I didnt like it.
In the meantime till Ghost 12 was out I used Acronis and it was great as well.
I use both extensively now.

**glenglenn** · May 15th, 2008, 11:05 AM

I ordered Solutions 2.0, not knowing Ghost 12 would work with Vista. I was wondering what about Solutions you didn't like?

I think also from what you guys are saying about Acronis, that I am going to try that out also. I like the idea of creating my own hard drives with hidden recovery partitions like the big boys. Which version do you recommend?

**slgrieb** · May 15th, 2008, 03:00 PM

Generally, I believe in staying current, so I'd do v. 11. Of course Acronis sells specific products targeted at different groups of users, from home/small business to enterprise level. Their trial downloads are fully functional, but time-limited, FYI.