Other Norton Products

[Brian_K]

Just a comment on the Ghost CD.

Utilities

Run Support Tool

There are some interesting tools here. For example...

MBR Operations
Restore a MBR
Use current MBR       (writes a Win7 MBR, no disk signature)

The word "current" is a little misleading as it is not your MBR. It is generic Win7 boot code.

Another interesting one is...

First Track Operations
Wipe             (doesn't wipe LBA-0 so partitions remain as well as the same boot code)( it zeroes LBA-1 to LBA-62)

[DaveH]

With XP it happens to me once in a while when I restore an image into a new virtual PC.  Even if I use the correct settings.

I figure it's just a quirk with virtual drives.

But I end up with just a blinking cursor and all I have to do is boot a W98 floppy and do a fdisk /mbr

The reason why I suggested using a command prompt for windows 7 is that I'm pretty sure the windows 7 statup repair does not rewrite the MBR.   I know that sounds stupid but I have seen people do a startup repair and still have the blinking cursor until I told them to do a bootrec /FixMbr

Dave

[nikoscbr]

Yes Dave and Brian,the not correct mbr and the wrong partition alignment were the cause.I managed to fix it.I removed grub bootloader and deleted all linux partitions.i rewrote the windows bootloader from command prompt,booted with gparted live cd and checked all disk partitions for correct allignment and errors.And yes,gparted found and corrected the partitions on the target  systems which had errors.After doing all that,i tried again the restore and this time i checked all 4 options in Ghost window: and it worked ! It went straight into windows without any problem ! The only thing i had to do afterwards was to reinstall both the latest nvidia graphics and the realtek sound drivers.And it did not rename the target partition it kept it as C: so it booted into windows without any problems ! So,yes.the correctly aligned hard disk partitions and MBR are both crucial for the restore to work.If the MBR or the disk partitions are not correct,the restore will definitely fail.And it's a good idea to have a live cd with partition managing software,like gparted or parted magic for example.It helped me a lot because there were errors in the disk partitions and gparted corrected them.So,you have to have all this things into account before you try the copy-restore proceedure otherwise it won't work.But seeing the second system functioning like the main one,within a few minutes,without having to do a clean install and spend two days downloading and setting up everything,is a miracle that Ghost can do.

It fixed my mood today,after yesterday's failure,to have the second system running like the first in an hour and without problems.So,again THANKS A TON, Dave and Brian for all your efforts and patience,i wouldn't have done it without your help guys ! THANK YOU AGAIN !!! i would hug both if you were here,you are both amazing,guys !!

Thank you both again !!

Nikos Alexiou

Athens 

[Brian_K]

Nikos,

Nice work. That's far better than reinstalling an OS.

Can you answer this question? How did you prepare the target HD prior to using Ghost on the first occasion? There were two partitions on that HD. What method/software did you use to remove the partitions?

[nikoscbr · Accepted solution]

I used gparted live cd,booted with it and removed the target partitions in the second computer.

This gave me the correct full capacity of the 2 velociraptors,588 gb.Then i formated the ful 588 gb partition to NTFS and checked it with gparted for errors.Nothing,it was aligned ok and correct.And finally,i booted with the Ghost cd and guided it to restore the image of the sourse disk,to the (correct this time) 588 gb partition (of the two  300x2 velociraptors).I had already formated the partition to NTFS with gparted,so Ghost saw it and i checked all the 4 options before starting the recovery.

Which were:1) check the recovery image for errors before startin recovery, 2) restore original disk signature 3) restore MBR,master boot record and 4)reboot after restore.And of course,i didn't check the option to resize the target disk before recovery,as i had already done this before with gparted,so since Ghost saw the correct disk capacity of the 2 raptors (588gb) there was no need to resize.Ghost started the recovery it took about 30 minutes to complete and then it booted straight into windows,without a hitch.The important thing is,that the source and target partitions have to be correctly alignment and without errors before doing any cloning or recovery job,otherwise it's certain that you will have problems and the recovery will fail.

So,it's important to have a good disk partitioning and disk checking software,before doing anything related to cloning/recovery.

I used to have the older Partition Magic software,from PowerQuest in the old days of winxp,back in 2002-2003,before Symantec bought it,and it worked perfectly with windows xp.But from vista and so forth,and especially for 64 bits vista and seven,i had to use something else for partitioning tasks,so i saw gparted in sourgeforce site,tried it and it worked fine.

This is what i used in this occasion and it went ok.And because i have enough knowledge about Linux and OpenSource software,it was easy for me to use it.And i am glad that it worked and i didn't have to do a clean install of windows again,it would take me 2-3 days to make the system exactly like i wanted it,so the combination of Ghost and Gparted did a very good job here.

[Brian_K]

Nikos,

I think you are describing the second Ghost restore. The one that worked. I'm interested in what you did to the target HD before the first Ghost restore. The restore that failed. That HD contained a 100 MB partition and a 500 GB partition. What did you do to this HD before the failed Ghost restore?

[nikoscbr]

Well,at the failed restore,i had first booted with the windows disk and from the command prompt i had given the order "rootrec.exe /fixboot" to delete grub and rewrite the windows bootloader.Then i rebooted into windows from the target system,and from disk management i deleted all partitions in the target drive.Both the 3 linux ones (root,home and swap,20,15 and 5 gb accordingly) and the disk C: partition too.I wiped them all and then recreated the single partition.But i didn't format the recreated partition,i left it as unallocated space.And then i tried booting with Ghost disk and telling ghost to restore the source image to the unallocated partition and to resize and format the partition in ntfs.Ghost restored the image and formated the partition but it seems that the mbr was missing,and that's why it didn't boot into windows and showed me the blinking dash after the bios screen.Ghost restored the image,but the master boot record and also the partition alignment were not correct and that's why the booting failed.It wasn't only the MBR,the partition alignment was also wrong.I found this after i checked the partitions with gparted.

[Brian_K]

Nikos,

We are still not discussing the same topic. My understanding was you were going to restore images to the computer with the twin 300 GB HDs. The computer that showed Disk 0 as a 500 GB disk in Disk Management. What did you do to this disk before you commenced the restore? Did you wipe the HD? Which app did you use for the wipe?

Omit any reference to Ghost as I'm interested in what happened before Ghost was used.

[nikoscbr]

Dear Brian,

of course i had wiped them off.All,both the 500 gb and the small 100 mb partition.This was the very first thing i did.With what software i wiped them off? I said it,with opensource gparted live cd.I deleted both partitions and created a single one,with a 588 gb capacity.And after i had checked this 588 gb partition for any errors,then i tried the restore. 

[Brian_K]

Nikos,

Thanks. There is a difference between wiping a HD and deleting partitions on a HD. Wiping involves writing random data (or zeroes) to the entire HD. Deleting partitions just removes information from the partition table so the boot code and disk signature remains intact. In fact the partition data is intact too because you can undelete a deleted partition.

I see that you didn't follow my instructions about restoring into unallocated space. You restored into a partition which can sometimes cause issues.