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[Brian_K]

Dave,

What you said about cylinder/2048 sector restores makes sense. It would mess up the BCD.

When I setup my test Microsoft multiboot I Installed WinXP and then 3 Win7. I then realised the 3 Win7 partitions were cylinder aligned so I converted them to 2048 sector aligned. None of the 3 booted until I did a BCD edit on each.

Edit... I'll let you post your Copy Drive results first.

[DaveH]

It's more than just the BCD edits.

If you look at the data in MountedDevices, everything in there becomes "wrong" as well because the "Volume ID's" as well as the partition signatures no longer match what they should be since they are composed of the starting sector as well.

Thats what creates the problem in booting when the operating system ends up taking the wrong drive letter.

If was a single OS system I'm sure it would boot with no problem but since it's a multiboot we all of a sudden notice it as a problem.

I can clearly see different data values in the same operating systems, in the 2 different versions of each I have now.

(Cylinder aligned and offset, I now have working images of each).

I just made a significant find that may explain why Deric keeps bringing up Ghost 12.

The Ghost 12 recovery disk, even though it is also Vista based, preserves the cylinder alignment of the partitions.

On a blank disk I can restore my clinder aligned images with the Ghost 12 recovery disk and all the partitions end up cylinder aligned.  Unlike with the Ghost 15 disk.

Each OS therefore boots with no problems at all and no extra entries get added to the boot menu.

I still haven't figured out how the Vista PE disk makes those partitions?

I'm trying to move some of my image sets off my data drive so I can do a copy drive.

But this old system I'm using is pretty slow and the USB2 card I'm using isn't giving me full performance.

Dave

[Brian_K]

I'm so disappointed with my results I'm giving up further testing until I hear about your experience.

[DaveH]

I'm trying a copy drive now.

Hope I do it right.  I thought I could select the first partition to copy and then go back to select the others one at a time and have the copy process go all at once.

I can't find a way to do that, maybe I'm confusing it with restoring images.

But I'm going to predict it's going to work fine.

I'm using the system that was restored with Ghost 12, it's identical to the way I originally installed everything.

4 primary partitions all cylinder aligned.

The reason why I think it's going to work is that I have Ghost installed into XP and I figure Ghost will be using XP to make the partitions so it will end up all cylinder aligned and they all will boot without any problems.

This will be different from Deric, he has Ghost installed into either windows 7 or Vista and therefore I bet he is ending up with offset partitions and thats causing his boot problems and the last 3 operating systems taking on the wrong letters.

Dave

[Brian_K]

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DaveH wrote:

But I'm going to predict it's going to work fine.

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If you win the bet I'm sending your money to that nice investment adviser in Nigeria.

[DaveH]

The head of the united nations sent me an email offering me a lot of money to help him move funds out of some country, it wasn't nigeria either.

I finished it and can't boot nothing.

I'm getting an error about " a recent hardware change or something may have screwed my system"

Then it says \ntldr  the entry could not be loaded because it is missing or corrupt.

I think I screwed up when I selected "restore MBR" for the XP partition?

It shouldn't be trying to boot that anyway, it should be booting bootmgr since it's now a Vista\7 bootloader.

Dave

[Brian_K]

Have you tried to boot the OSs on the old HD? Are any corrupted?

[DaveH]

I finally got the system to boot on the old drive (the source).

I think I have a hardware issue, and the copy drive test is inconclusive.

When I was trying to boot the clone, I kept getting that error.  Finally I went into the BIOS and noticed that it could read the type of drive it was and the serial number, it would not display the size?

Both of these are WD 120GB ATA drives.  The setting for "single" with no slave is to remove the jumper, the master/slave settings are only used when 2 share the same IDE cable.

I can't even get the system to boot anymore with both drives attached.

I got it booted now with just the original source drive with the jumper removed, but I still can't get the other to properly come up in the BIOS now.

Darn strange.  I think maybe something happened changing the jumpers around or changing the cables back and forth damaged one. 

I know I have some unused cables around here somewhere but it's getting late.

[Brian_K]

Well I have a different result.

I had 4 OS. WinXP was cylinder aligned.  Three Win7 (A B C) were 2048 sector aligned. Ghost was installed in Win7A.

Using Copy Drive, Win XP was successfully copied to the second HD. Copy MBR was not selected. When I tried to Copy Drive Win7A, the second HD wasn’t available as a destination. As Deric has reported. The second HD was Offline and on checking, the second HD had the same Disk Signature as the first HD.

I then tried to boot Win7A and saw Preparing your Desktop and a message that I was logged into a Temporary Profile. Ghost would not run and the drive letter of Win7A  was C: when it had previously been E: drive. WinXP on the original HD had no drive letter. The drive letters in MountedDevices were a “mess”.  Fixing the letters allowed Win7A to load correctly and Ghost 15 to work.

The 4 partitions on the first HD were restored from an image. Win7A booted normally.

Copy drive was again commenced but with the same results. I should mention that new WinXP was a 2048 sector aligned partition, as Dave predicted.

I converted the WinXP partition to 2048 sector aligned. Now, all partitions on HD0 are 2048 sector aligned. I tried Copy Drive again. Same results as above.

In summary I could only Copy WinXP and the process corrupted MountedDevices in Win7A.

The three of us have had different unpleasant experiences.

[DStain]

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DaveH wrote:

Check the first few lines of the partinfo,txt you attached

It says "F:\Program Files\Norton Ghost\Utility\PartInfo.exe"

Path:    F:/Windows/

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That is where Ghost 12 is installed and the only place I can get partinfo from.

Win7 (2) is on F:

I though last night that I would slip in the 120 gig "clone" and uninstall G15 this afternoon off F: and install it on C: (XP), to make sure I will use the NRT, then post the partinfo of the two setups.

I read and digested what you said about cylinder alignment etc, swapping Ghost to XP is the only thing I haven't tried yet.

Then I will go for another test on Image/Restore first and then Copy/Drive.

I have been saying all along that there is a difference with G12 and G15 basic code, I'm no expert but the only way I could get a successful "clone" using Image/Restore was with G12.

Deric