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[chanmay]

Hello,

Would anyone please help me. I used Ghost 12 to duplicate my labtop hard drive to another hard drive. I used the options: set drive active drive and copy MBR to the new target drive. The process went thru fine, but when I removed the master drive and installed the duplicted drive in my laptop. The Windows XP booted up with the big Windows XP logo, but until just before it is going to the destop, It hung right there with the small Windows XP logo on the screen.

Thank you

[LV_Bill]

Numerous posters in this forum (myself included) have had exactly the same problem -- booting a newly cloned backup disk fails with a freeze-up at the first blue screen about 45-60 seconds into the boot-up process.  No one seems to know what the cause is, but there is a workaround solution.  First delete all the partition(s) off of the intended destination drive.  Then, repeat the Copy My Hard Drive operation by copying C:\ to \Unallocated, instead of C:\ to ?:\. Your booting problem will disappear.

Hope this works for you, Bill

[djdyal]

I just had this problem as well.  If you search the Support section at Norton, they will tell you that there is an issue with your Master Boot Record and that you need to run Fixmbr from the Recovery console.  I verified that with a technical rep.  However, after a few days of research and trial and error, as well as one more chat with a technical rep, I found the solution (s) and the new drive boots perfectly.

First, when you copy a drive to a new hard drive, you need to leave the destination drive unallocated.  It would seem natural to use the Disk Management system to turn on the new drive and format it, but you do not want to do that.  The copy process will format the new drive and allocate the exact space it needs for the copy.  If the new drive is bigger than the old, you can add a partition.  So, you will need to run Disk Management on the new drive and click on "Delete Partition".  This will unallocate the drive, then you can run the copy.  Ghost will fins the destination drive and it show it as unallocated space.  You just click that as the destination.

Second, and this the tech reps won't tell you, is you need to check the boot.ini file.  This file may contain an identifier which associates it with a specific hard drive.  You should back up the ini file and modify the active one to look like a generic as in:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect

Otherwise, XP will not continue because the identifier does not match that of the new drive.

[chanmay]

Thank you so much for your time and sharing your experience.

[chanmay]

May I ask where is boot.ini located? I searched but did not find it.

Thank you.

[djdyal]

The boot.ini file is located in the root directory, usually the C drive.  The file is usually hidden from the user so it will not be changed inadvertently.  To view it, you will have to go to My Computer, click the C drive.  Then go to the menu and click on Tools, Folder Options, View.  Then, uncheck the box that says hide protected system files.  The boot.ini file will be visible.  If you click on it, it will open in Notepad.  Make a back-up copy just in case.

[LV_Bill]

Djdyal -   Your advise about deleting existing partitions and cloning to \unallocated was exactly right.  However, cloning to a new hard drive that has never been formatted can sometimes be a problem.  For the future, the best advise is -- new drives should be activated normally using Computer Management including a full format (write/test every track). Then, delete the partition, and run Ghost Copy My Hard Drive. This will save a lot of potential headaches.

Bill

Message Edited by LV_Bill on 02-03-2009 08:19 AM

[chanmay]

Thank you LV_Bill and djdyal a million!!!! I have my cloning disk working now. It seems booting slower than the master disk, but It's OK.

Norton should post these tricks in their FAQ on the front page website.

[djdyal]

You are certainly welcome.  I have gotten so much help over the years from forums like this that I thought it was time to give back a little.  And, I agree with the prior post about formatting the drive first and then unallocating it, I didn't think to address that because you had already formatted it.  I'm not sure why it would boot any slower than before, that is a little beyond my level.  One other thing that I did after I was satisfied that the drive was working properly was to go to disk management and check the disk for errors amd have it correct any that were found.  After I did that, it seems to be working great.  You can access disk management by right clicking on My Computer, then Manage, the Disk Management.  If you select the drive and right click it a menu will appear and you can select Properties, then Tools.  The Tools menu will allo you to run  a check disk or disk defragment.