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[DaveH]

OK, tell me if I'm on the right track.

I removed all the partitions on the hard drive using another PE disk.

Then I booted to the Ghost recovery disk and restored all 4 OS's. I selected them one at a time then clicked the "add" button to select the next image.  When I was sure I got them all in the right order I rebooted but I could only reboot into XP.

Using EasyBCD I could see that the Vista and Win7 options no longer had a listing for target drive of the other operating systems.  (It usually shows the partition relative to where you are viewing it from, Vista should be D, Windows 7 E and F).

An extra entry was added for windows 2003 and although that showed the correct target as D, the "BCD ID" was diferent from the original Vista entry.

When I booted that choice I would also get hung on "preparing your desktop" because Vista was trying to load as E instead of D.

So right off the bat I think the main issue I have now is that Ghost restored everything to offset partitions instead of the cylinder aligned ones that I originally made with XP.

Everything is shifted a little bit farther down the disk so the partition ID's are no longer the same.

I think Vista restored as E instead of D because when I booted to the recovery disk maybe HD was assigned D by Ghost.

What I did was boot back into XP and mounted the Vista system registry. 

What was listed as D, I renamed to K:

Then since Vista was trying to load as E I renamed E to the correct letter D and I was able to boot into vista with no problems.

Looking in "My Computer" I can see that HD1, my backup drive is now K:, so I can tell that was the offending partition.

I haven't figured out when the registry got changed yet, I guess I can try restoring that partition again and see if it stll works.

Dave

[DaveH]

So far I think the partition alignment may just be the problem.

When I created these partitions in XP I made them all 20GB primaries using the value of 20480MB.

I booted to another PE disk and deleted all the partitions.  Then I used Partition Magic (just because it was handy).

To boot into DOS and create 4 primary partitions 20GB in size, since PM doesn't know about offset partitions they were all created with cylinder alignment just like XP would make them.

I then booted to the Ghost disc and restored the 4 images into those existing empty partitions.  Again restoring "all 4 at once" like Deric preferes.

Everything worked fine, I can boot into each of the 4 operating systems with no problems or without having to fix anything.

EasyBCD shows all the entries are present just like before making the image.

Curiously, I did not get the extra entry added to the boot menu this time.  Perhaps that only gets added if something changes and maybe that explains why I have never seen anything added to the boot menu before.

Still have a few more things to test before moving on to copy drive.

Dave

[DaveH]

This time I wiped the disk and then used the Ghost recovery disk to restore all 4 partitions again.

From my first test I knew that because they would be restored into 2048 offset partitions, I would have the same problems as before.

Interestingly, this time I ended up with 3 extra entries added to my boot menu and as before, XP was the only OS that could boot properly.  The new entries added to the boot menu had the correct "partition ID's" confirming my suspicion that Ghost may have added these entries because it could tell the old ones were not valid.

I used EasyBCD to rename the new entries, delete the old entries and check that they were pointing to the proper drives.  (as seen by XP).

Then as I booted up each of the other operating systems, they all hung at "preparing your desktop" or gave other errors about not being able to find files.  Windows 7 pro (partition 4) actually booted but it was a hybrid and created a new user profile that I later found on my backup drive.

(I'm running all 4 OS's as trials, they are not activated so I never got the "not authentic" error).

Since only XP boots as C, I found out the hard way that you can't just clear the mounted devices registry key, when that is done the OS will try to take on the letter C at first boot and you end up with the same problem.

I would have to open the task manager and try to figure out what letter Windows thought it was and then edit the registry as I outlined above to rename the wrong letter to the letter is should be.

I also could not run regedit from the task manager in most of the OS's.  One one it worked, (I think the one that tried to boot as C).  on the others it just gave me an error about file not found.

Once I got each OS to boot properly I had to use disk management to change all the other drive letters as well.

Since all the partitions now had different partition signatures every partition in each OS had the letters different than what they should be.

I finally ended up with a quad boot system on vista\7 offset partitions.

With the drive letters how they should be  XP=C, Vista=D, 7Home=E, and 7Pro=F.

(HD1, the data drive is now K in all systems).

Now I could finally start the new test.

I booted to XP (The OS with Ghost installed) and reimaged all 4 partitions.  Then booted to another PE disk and deleted all the partitions on disk0.

Then I booted to the Ghost recovery disk and restored all 4 partitions onto the empty drive (all at once).

Each OS booted properly, all the drive letters were correct and no extra entries were added to the boot menu.

So I can restore 4 cylinder aligned (offset 63) operating system partitions into 4 existing cylinder aligned partitions and the quad boot works fine.

I can also restore 4 working 2048 offset partitions and eveything works fine.

The problems encountered is when trying to restore cylinder aligned partitions into offset  partitions created by Ghost (Vista really)

But I'm sure Brian already figured this out.  Thanks for not telling me and letting me try to figure it out.

Dave

Edit- BTW,  I would not consider this a problem with the windows boot manager in any way.

I would have to consider it more like "Windows freaks out when all the partition signatures have changed".

But It's Ghost's reliance on Vista to create the partitions that causes the problem in the first place..

[DStain]

Dave,

First of all I think Brian was winding you up, he really meant that I was an expert multi boot user which is still very flattering coming from Brian.

Because you have posted 3 very long and intense posts, lets deal with it one at a time,message 28 first.

Even before you backed up the primary drive the boot menu should have been adjusted, to read Win XP Pro, Win Vista, Win 7 Home and Win 7 Pro.

XP can only be renamed at this stage in bootini.exe, as you are aware you can type in what you want inbetween the inverted commers then XP Vista and the 2 Win 7s can be renamed in Easy BCD.

So do XP first and get the name right and then boot into Win 7 where Easy BCD should be and adjust the menu, reboot and check the menu, it should read as in message 68.

When you backup the primary drive and then reimage that menu will be reproduced as you set it up.

I can't see why you need to use the "add" button, I never have to so long as you have backed up the primary drive like I said, highlight them all and run it, Ghost backs them up in order.

When you check the recovery point .sv2i and all the .v2i files will be listed C:,D:,E,and F: perfect.

When you run a recovery all you need do is highlight all 4 partitions again following up with the rest of the standard settings to re-image and Ghost will image them in the correct order. My Ghost software is installed on F: the last one Win7 (2).

When you talk about cylinder alignment and other HDD design jargon I am lost so keep it simple mate

Deric

[DStain]

Sorry Dave,

I meant message 71 to start with,

Now for message 72.

Again,"offset partition" and "cylinder alignment" I don't know about, I can see that you have an 80 gig drive in 4 equal parts, set up ready to install the O/Ss, XP, Vista, Win7 H and Win 7 Pro via the image taken previously.

I can see then that you re-imaged the prepared drive to act as the source like I do, selecting the restore point highlighting all 4 drives as I do and then hitting the button.

Just to confirm Dave, when you re-image using the backup / restore point you will not get any extra entries in the menu, because that is what I have had to do when my spare source drive was messed up by Ghost.

It is a multi boot computer recovery and it wouldn't take long to do 20 minutes at the most when only O/Ss are installed.

The problems will show up when you do the next two tests, "copy drive" and "image-restore" that is when you get the extra entries to the boot menu.

Deric

[DaveH]

Partitions made with XP and all previous operating systems are "cylinder aligned"  the starting sector for the first partition is on sector 63 of the hard drive and every partition made on that drive will follow that alignment.

Partitions made with Vista, Windows 7, and the Ghost recovery disk start at sector 2048  they are ofset from the front of the drive by 1MB and all partitions made by those operating systems will follow that same alignment.

Since XP is the first operating system on our hard drive, it is cylinder aligned.   I also used XP to create the other partitions for vista and both versions of windows 7 so they are also cylinder aligned.

When I restore images of those partitions with the Ghost 15 recovery disk on an empty blank hard drive, since the recovery disk uses Vista, Ghost creates 2048 aligned partitions for the images.

Since the alignment is different than the original, extra entries are added to my boot menu and I am unable to boot the other operating systems without problems.  XP boots fine because it doesn't care what kind of partition it is on, as long as it is still the first partition on the drive.

I recall you had similar problems doing image/restore with Ghost 15.  I remember you were able to boot XP and one of the other operating systems but you were not able to boot all 4 without fixing them.

But in summary, I was able to restore the cylinder aligned partitions into cylinder aligned partitions without any problems, all 4 operating systems booted fine and no extra entries were added to the boot menu.

I was also able to restore images of 4 offset partitions into the offset partitions created by the Ghost recovery disk without any problems using Ghost 15.  All 4 operating systems booted fine and no extra entries were added to the boot menu.

Does that sound like the same problems you encountered?

Dave

[DStain]

Dave,

Now we are dealing with message 73,

Ever since I have been using Ghost 15 to restore an image I have been getting these extra entries, didn't get it with G12.

In your second paragraph you describe the boot options and that is what I have been getting.

When it comes to the registry I wouldn't quite know what to do there all I can say is that the system is fouled up and I have to re-image to start again.As you say you can boot ok with XP and the last in line Win7 Pro, that is exactly what I get.

The difference with my system is that Ghost is installed on F: Win7 (2), I know I haven't named them because both Win7s have different desktop pictures that is how I tell them apart for testing.

Again you are talking about cylinder aligned (offset 63) and 2048 offset partitions means nothing to me but I think I can get the gist of what you are saying in effect you can't mix the two, and I wouldn't know how to tell the two apart.

Brian will be following this much better than me, I being self taught on computers as a hobby I didn't get into how HDDs work and it's to late in life to take it in now.

Your edit paragraph make sense now that I have read and digested your report.

The true test is yet to come "Copy My Hard Drive" and an "Image-Restore" or "Image-Transfer" as I like to call it, terminology gets confusing.

My understanding is this :- A "re-image" is to recover a computer to the original primary drive, as is a "recovery" and a "restore". "Copy My Hard Drive" and a "Image-Restore" is a "cloned" drive correct?

Deric

[DaveH]

A "clone" would be a hard drive that is a copy of the original.

There are different ways to end up with a clone, image\restore or copy drive will give the result of ending up with a drive that is a clone of the original.

A lot of people incorrectly use the term as a verb, they use the term "cloning a drive" as doing a copy disk and thats where the confusion comes in.

When I say image\restore, I mean to say that I created images of all the partitions and then restored them onto an empty drive.

I have already done that, several times with this test system.

I have yet to do a copy drive because like an idiot I stored all my images on a drive that is identical in size to the one I am using for the operating systems.

I am going to have to move all those images elsewhere or find another drive to use for the copy drive that is the same size or larger.

[DaveH]

Deric, attach a partinfo.txt file.

Go into the ghost\utility folder and run partinfo, then attach the text file it makes.

[DStain]

Dave,

replying to message 76, 

Now it is beginning to make some sense, in most cases during my tests XP has always booted but one test trying a "Copy Drive" XP wouldn't boot.

I can see now that the two can't mix, in other words they would overlap and Ghost would be fazed by it, hence the extra entries on the menu and Windows don't know where to boot on the disk. 

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I recall you had similar problems doing image/restore with Ghost 15.  I remember you were able to boot XP and one of the other operating systems but you were not able to boot all 4 without fixing them

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Not quite Dave, you are correct I could only boot XP and Win 7 (2) the first and last but that was a re-image or recovery to 4 separate drives. I then went to a single drive with 4 partitions and G15 worked ok to restore the computer (primary drive) but always had the extra entries to sort out with Easy BCD.

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But in summary, I was able to restore the cylinder aligned partitions into cylinder aligned partitions without any problems, all 4 operating systems booted fine and no extra entries were added to the boot menu.

I was also able to restore images of 4 offset partitions into the offset partitions created by the Ghost recovery disk without any problems using Ghost 15.  All 4 operating systems booted fine and no extra entries were added to the boot menu.

Does that sound like the same problems you encountered?

---

Yes you have got it in a nutshell, I think that sums it up as far as a re-image or recovery is concerned.

At the end of the day this exercise is all about using Ghost 15 to produce a "clone" for want of a better term and G15 just won't do it.

Now, with a "clone" the target drive has to be deleted creating all unallocated space for the image to be transferred to one partition at a time, hence my term "image-transfer".

Now how do we create a source drive with say 4 cylinder aligned partitions containing O/Ss that can be transferred to the target drive ( all unallocated space)?

When I first set up my multi boot machine a single drive was fitted in it (160 gig drive) I firstly installed XP and then I partitioned the drive with Partition Magic 8 into 4 equal partitions and then installed Vista from XP, Win 7(1) from Vista and Win 7 (2) from Win 7 (1).

I have still got that backup as a basic test platform and that would be a cylinder aligned partitioned drive.

The backup I used for my 120 gig "clone" was an update of that first backup.

Deric