Norton Ghost 15 will not clone my hard drive

terryftdrd · ‎05-14-2012

I am having problems with cloning my windows XP hard drive to another.

I have created a recovery point on my system for the C drive and then tried to recover this partition to another hard drive.

I am doing this so that I have a duplicate hard drive with the new system with all its drivers and software installed because this is the third hard drive I have installed this year due to virus attacks or failure somewhere... I did have Norton 2012 anti virus installed at the time but still got attacked.

So I have reinstalled the system and all its software and have tried several features.

I have tried the copy disk feature but when I try to boot up off the newly copied drive I get a boot failure.

Seperately - I have tried to install a base system on the new drive and then restore from the restore point off the other drive but it simply hangs at the windows logo when it boots up off the copy.

I used to use the original DOS version of Ghost but it does not work with XP - that's why I decided to buy the latest version, but it's not doing what it says on the tin - for me anyway...

I would like to contact Norton support directly from the UK but it's a bit costly given that I have just paid 40 pounds for a product that simply does not make an iso image of the original drive which can then be transferred to another drive without a lot of hassle.

It takes me around two days to reinstall all the system again as I have a lot of microsoft and adobe products which in themselves take ages to install. - in the past (Win 98 days) I could simply create an ISO which had all the software on it and restore from a second drive. Why isn't it that simple anymore??

I would greatly appreciate any feedback from anyone who can help me resolve the issue of cloning this existing installation of windows to another drive so that I have a ready-to-plug in hard drive in case this one fails yet again. Thank you all in advance.

Terry

DaveH · ‎01-06-2010

Where is the recovery point, is it on another internal or external drive?

We really don't reccomend keeping them on CD's or DVD's because optical discs really are unreliable.

But if you have a spare internal hard drive to restore the image onto and another place to hold the image file it should be a piece of cake.

Please post a screen shot of disk management so we can make sure you don't have any hidden recovery or diagnostic partitions to deal with.

http://community.norton.com/t5/Forum-Feedback/Forum-Tip-How-to-post-screenshots-in-the-forum/td-p/25...

Dave

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

terryftdrd wrote:

I used to use the original DOS version of Ghost but it does not work with XP -

Terry,

I you are thinking of Ghost 2003 (DOS Ghost), used appropriately it works with WinXP, Win7 and Win8.

terryftdrd · ‎05-14-2012

Here is what I have done to repeat the operation.

I have three hard drives.

Drive A) the newly installed operating system and all its installed and registered software

Drive B) the spare Hard drive where the ghost backup images are stored.

Drive C) the new hard drive where I am cloning drive A to.

I booted up with drive A and B and created a backup of computer to recovery point on B.

After creating recovery point - rebooted with A anc C and ensured that C had no partitions on it at all - otherwise known as uninitialised.

I then rebooted with Drive B and Drive C installed and booted off the CDROM with Norton Ghost 15.

I then chose to restore hard drive from image - and selected the backup image I created on Drive B earlier.

After the restore took place - I rebooted the PC with drive C and got the following error:

NTLDR is missing - press CTRL + ALT + Del to reboot.

Please can anyone direct me as where I go from here.

Thanks in advance

Terry

DStain · ‎08-26-2010

Terry,

have a read of this post Here and follow it to the letter.

Edit, Make sure when you reboot with B and C that you boot to the correct drive, check in the bios or hit F12 or another key for the boot menu.

Deric

Brian_K · ‎04-19-2009

Terry,

As Dave mentioned, we'd be able to help if you posted a screenshot.

terryftdrd · ‎05-14-2012

THANK YOU everyone.

I did as the previous post suggested and tonight the clone hard drive breathed life.

In other words it worked.

I am so relieved and have now written down everything in case I have to do it in the future.,

Thank you very much everyone for your assistance and I now have belief in the Norton Ghost Product. IT DOES WORK - albeit a little awkwardly at first - I still prefer the old original DOS version but alas my dos version will not work with NTFS.

Regards

Terry