Other Norton Products

[Terry-C]

I have a HP laptop that the HD needed to be replaced due to hardware failure. I was still able to get into the machine by using F1 on startup so I loaded Norton Ghost. I acquired a new disk drive ( the same as original) and connected it to the laptop using a USB enclosure. I then partitioned the new drive as close to the original as possible. Basically two partitions HP_VISTA and HP_RECOVERY. I then started Ghost and went to Tasks and used the copy disk option. I copied both partitions with no problems. I then removed the failing HD and install the new one. The operating system came up and asked me to login one of my users. I selected my account and the system said it was restring my desktop. After about 5 minutes the screen went blue and that's it... I went into Task Manager and switched users but the other account do not work. Should I be using the disk copy option while the system is running to clone the HD?

Any suggestion?

Terry Campbell

[DaveH]

I think you made a very common mistake that we see here a lot because the instructions in the manual are not clear about this.

You can not do the copy into partitions that have a drive letter or windows will take on the wrong drive letter and cause a problem.

But I don't think doing a disk copy over USB is going to work on your system anyway.   Unless something has changed, HP systems use a nonstandard 240 head alignment for the hard drives and USB is unable to create that geometry on an external drive. 

Unless you can install both drives at once so they are directly attached to the motherboard, you will have to create system images to another location, swap drives and then restore the images onto the new drive while it is attached to the motherboard.

Do you have another external drive you can use to hold the images?

Dave

[Brian_K]

Terry,

I'm surprised you got that far. As Dave mentioned, you had three things against you. The way you copied, the 240 heads BIOS and the USB external HD. Well, the gods must be with you so try this....

http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Ghost-15-installed-today-cloned-quot-C-quot-Dri...

[Brian_K]

Terry,

Any feedback for us?

[Terry-C]

Thanks Brian-K for the followup.

Taking into consideration the comments, the time I spent trying to clone the drive and since this is a HP laptop I gave up and took it to a technician.

Regards

Terry-C