Ghost 15 options for recovery

Brian,

In regards to your instructions above:

We are having trouble applying a Windows 7 image to different hard drives that don't have SRPs.  Here is what we're doing:

FOR THE SRP

Verify recovery point before restore
Partition type : Primary
Check for file system errors after recovery
Set drive active (for booting OS)
Restore original disk signature
Restore master boot record

FOR WIN7 PARTITION
Verify recovery point before restore
Partition type : Primary
Check for file system errors after recovery
Restore original disk signature
Restore master boot record

After the restore, we get all the way to the "Starting Windows" screen and it just sits there forever.  What are we doing wrong?  Should we not even be restoring the SRP?  I noticed in your instructions for "Restore to a new HD if a SRP is NOT present" that you haven't broken it apart for the SRP and Win7 separately.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - these recoveries are driving us crazy!!!

-Ted

Brian,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly - I'm sorry my explanation was a little confusing.

Our images are all from Dell computers where we only have the SRP and the C: Drive partitions.

When we create the backup with Ghost 15.0, we include the SRP in the backup.

We are restoring the image to either the same computer or to a HD on an identical model & hard drive size.

Should we be using your recommended settings for "Restore to a new HD if a SRP is present"??

Thanks,

Ted

Brian,

I have heard of these hardware problems - however, if there was no indication of hardware failure and the unit was booting up fine previously, I would think we are just selecting the wrong options in Ghost?

If we had chosen "Restore MBR" for the C: Drive image (non-system reserved), would that be causing our symptoms?  I recall instructions from Norton when I was on the phone with them and they told me to Restore MBR for both the SRP and the Win7 partition.  Perhaps that is causing all our problems?

Thanks for all your help and how quickly it has come!

-Ted

PMJI Teddy,

I'm not really knowledgable about disk structure but when I've been doing some system restores recently on a laptop -- however not with GHOST as it happens -- I had made an image of the hard drive initially onto an USB connected hard drive and then restored it to a blank larger hard drive in the laptop as a replacement.

It was a COMPAQ but with a SRP and I made the image of the whole drive -- C: and the SRP -- booting to the imaging software CD.

When I restored I just restored the image onto the out of the box new hard drive without any preparation and it did the job perfectly without any specific action on the MBR. The drive just booted up normally

All of which is a lead in to a question -- why did you take a specific action to restore the MBR? Was it because the system would not boot up after restoring the image or did not show the SRP? What "source" did you use to restore the MBR?

I'm sorry if this is answered already but if so ignore the question which I ask because it is my understanding that the MBR contains the code that tells the BIOS what to do and that would include recognizing the two partitions on the drive. So unless you restored it from a source that knew the original geometry you could in fact stop the system from booting up properly.

Brian,

I'll let you know what my results are after this morning.  Thanks for all your recommendations.

When I said "we get all the way to the Starting Windows screen," I meant that the computer successfully gets through the Dell splash screen and then into the Starting Windows screen, where it freezes.  The Windows symbol animates, so the monitor image itself is not frozen, but it never gets beyond that screen.  Does that make sense?

I started an online chat with a Norton support technician who told me "It is not necessary to have the System Reserved partition.  We need to restore the C: always first and boot the computer and check whether its working fine.  Since the C: is the one that has the Boot file location."

-Ted

Ok, so here are the results...

Using Brian's suggested settings for Restore to a new HD if a SRP is present, I got to the Starting Windows screen and it remained frozen there.

Using the Norton support tech's advice of *only restoring the C: image*, it booted up to a "BOOTMGR is Missing" error.  I booted to the Win 7 DVD and did a repair.  Restart gave the same error message.  Booted to Win 7 DVD again and did a repair.  System booted into Windows 7 successfully.

In Disk Management, there is no SRP, only a C: Drive partition (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition).

I am ecstatic that I have finally gotten Ghost to work for our Windows 7 images, but this is a very round-about way of getting it done!  Does anyone have any suggestions???  If I cut an image of this machine now without an SRP, will that make it easier to restore that image in the future?

-Teddy

Brian,

Not sure what Sysprep is, so I'm fairly confident that was not part of us creating our Ghost images.  Our system is pretty simple (or at least I thought)... Dells that we have stripped down to just SRP and C: partitions, imaging them with Ghost with all of the defaults to an external USB drive, and then restoring them with Ghost from the same USB external drive.  Nothing too complicated in my opinion.  To me, it makes no sense that I can restore the image right onto the same computer the image came from and it renders the computer unable to boot.  I must be doing something fundamentally wrong.

Do you suggest I pull the RAM if I encounter this stuck screen?

-Ted

As a side note, would any settings pertaining to SATA operation have anything to do with this?

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Teddy12 wrote:

As a side note, would any settings pertaining to SATA operation have anything to do with this?

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If it's any help, I have a SATA drive going bad and when it's not working my system hangs on the animation screen for a very long time.  It eventially continues because it's not a system drive and when the drive decides to work it boots normally through that screen.

I'm not suggesting that your drive is bad but Windows defiantly is scanning or trying to access all the drives at that logo screen.

Dave

Brian - I can try to eliminate the USB HD, but frankly we have always been successful with restoring images from it with Ghost 14 and Vista/XP images and just restored one this afternoon with it actually.  It is a mirrored 2-HDD MyBook that has been flawless and does not have any hardware problems.

Dave - you bring up a good point about the scanning/trying to access.  I think the longest I've let that screen process is about 10 minutes.  Maybe one time, I'll let it sit there all night and see if it eventually goes through.  However, the whole point of imaging is a rapid recovery and waiting through that Windows screen kills our efficiency.

Any other suggestions?  I appreciate all these ideas you guys are bouncing off me.

When I said a long time, it's not that long.  About 4 minutes, but to me thats a long time to hang in the boot.

You said: "would any settings pertaining to SATA operation have anything to do with this?"

So I mentioned that as a possibility, why did you ask that, do you have reasons to believe you may have a problem there?

Dave,

The reason I bring up SATA operation on our hard drive is that our Ghost images for XP/Vista will sometimes not boot up a brand new Dell box because we frequently need to change SATA operation within BIOS from something like AHCI or IRRT over to ATA mode and then the machine will boot successfully.  I was thinking that these modes might have something to do with it, but I have tried every iteration of SATA mode with no success.

The more and more I delve into this mess, the more I think we should just remove the SRP from the equation to simplify our restore process, but this all just seems way too complicated and I hope Norton/Symantec will simplify things in further versions.

Thanks for all the help, guys.  If anything else pops into your heads that might help, I'd always be appreciative.

Thanks,

Ted