Hello,
I'm using Ghost 14.0 to clone the primary drive in a Dell Latitude D620 (laptop) to a 2nd hard drive (installed in the media bay). I am doing this for backup purposes and need the cloned drive to be bootable. The laptop is running Win XP Pro and it's on an AD domain. The disk copy process was successful with no errors. When I remove the primary drive and boot from the 2nd (cloned) drive, it boots to the logon prompt just fine. But when I attempt to login it logs itself out, closes network connections, and comes back to the logon prompt. This happens no matter what account I use to log on - even local. Please help. I haven't found any info about this issue on the Symantec site. Thanks.
-James
James,
This is a familiar story with cloning software. I assume you cloned into a partition and not into unallocated space.
See Messages #5 and #12 in....
http://community.norton.com/norton/board/message?board.id=other&thread.id=10364&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
You can make your clone boot in 30 seconds.
Hi Brian,
Yes, you are correct. I had cloned into a formatted partition with a drive letter. Since this computer doesn't have a floppy drive and I don't have access to an external one now (although I do have a Win98 boot floppy from years ago), I considered making a Win98 boot CD, but rather than fix the problem that way I decided to delete the partition from the new drive and clone into unallocated space (it's less than 30GB of data, so it only took about 15 minutes). Of course, it worked like a charm! Not to mention the fact that saying "I cloned into unallocated space" just sounds cool.
Now if we could just get the manual writers and Ghost help file writers to put this information into the documentation, the world would be a better place. I had thought the issue was something to do with a network driver or the VPN software because the problem didn't occur until I attempted to log in. I am very surprised that XP made it to the login prompt with no apparant issue! Any explanation for this? Thanks for providing the solution along with some very helpful and intresting information.
James
James,
That is good news. I'm disappointed with the Ghost userguide too. It has contained the same misleading information since Ghost 9 and its PowerQuest predecessor. I hope Erik can get it fixed for Ghost 15.
The situation you experienced is unusual. Failure to login. I've only seen it a couple of times in my tests. On most occasions you see a light blue screen with darker blue bands at the top and bottom and a small WinXP logo in the middle with no text message. The message missing is "Loading your personal settings..." At this point the OS is trying to understand why it can't use its former drive letter.
The issue applies to Vista and Win7 as well although they freeze on a different screen. The same fixes apply although you may also need to do a BCD Edit after zeroing the DiskID (Disk Signature). A better Ghost userguide should prevent the issue.
Message Edited by Brian_K on 07-10-2009 06:28 AM