Ghost 15 - Issues with Cloning a disk

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1

I'm replacing my 250GB disk with a 500 GB one on my desktop running Vista. Using Norton Ghost 15 I tried the following steps to clone the disk:

 

 1. Connected the new disk and using Disk Management initialized and formated it - Right-click on the "Unallocated" space and click "New Simple Volume....". Then in the "New Simple Volume Wizard" window clicled the "Next" button in the  "Specify Volume Size" window to accept the default volume size which is the  entire drive.  Selected the "Next" button in the "Assign Drive Letter or Path"  window to select the default drive letter, which was marked as "F"

 2. In Ghost, used Copy my Drive. Slected the source drive, checked the Show Hidden Drives box on the top right corner. Selected the destination drive. Selected "Set drive active (for booting OS)" check box in the "Advanced Options" window,  and also the "Copy MBR" check box. Then clicked Finish

 

3. When the process was finished, shutdown the computer, unplugged the power and SATA cables from both the drives and plugged the cables from the old drive to the new drive.

 

4. When I start the computer, it goes through the Vista startup screen and gets to the Log In screen. Then it shows Preparing your desktop on the screen. After that I get a light blue screen and nothing happens.

 

The old disk has a recovery image partition thaI I did not copy. And I realized that I did not select Expand Drive to fill Unalloacted space option. Also, I formatted the drive before initiating the clone.

 

Would appreciate how I can go about fixing this.

 

Thanks

2

I'm pretty busy today, I'll give you instructions on how to fix it if you want to try that instead of starting over.

You need to have the system setup with only the new drive installed, make sure the old drive is not plugged in.

 

Boot to the Ghost recovery disk.

Click: Analyze > Explorer my Computer

Make a note of what letter Ghost "sees" as your windows partition.  It may be C or it may be F

 

Now go to: Analyze > Open Command Shell

Type: regedit

On the left side click once on HKey_Local_Machine to highlight it

Then go to: File > Load Hive

Browse to X:\Windows\System32\Config  (Replace X with the letter you noted above, also start browsing by clicking "computer" on the left side because by default it will be pointing to the version of windows on the CD and not your hard drive)

Select the registry hive "System"  (it has no file extention).

It will ask you for a name, type Vista

 

Now expand Hkey_Local_Machine and go to Vista > MountedDevices

On the right hand side, delete all the entries except "default"

click once on the second entry and hold down the shift key while clicking the bottom entry.  They all become highlighed, then hit the delete button on your keyboard.

 

Click once on Vista on the left side to highlight it

Go to File > Unload Hive

 

Eject the CD, close all the boxes and click exit to reboot your system into windows.

 

Dave

 

 

 

 

 

 

3

Hi Dave,

 

Thanks for your reply. Right now I have the original drive connected and have disconnected the SATA and power cable from the new drive. It will be quite easy to disconnect the old drive connect its SATA cable to the new drive or connect the new drive with a new SATA cable and have both drives connected.

 

To your question - "The recovery partition that you chose not to copy, was it located before or after the windows partition?" if you mean the sequence in which it shows up, it was after the windows particition. HP manual suggested to burn recovery DVDs and the delete the recovery partiion to recover the disk space. I burnt the DVDs but never deleted the recovery partition. I can do that now.

 

At this point:

I am ok to start all over as it is just a matter of connecting the SATA and power cables. If you can provide me directions on how to proceed, that will be great - starting from how I can restore the new box to the state as it came out of the box (do I unallocate the space via Disk Management?)

 

Or, if there is any other way to fix the new drive in its current state, that is ok as well.

 

Really appreciate your help.

 

Thanks

4

Hi Dave,

 

I just replied to your other post.

 

The Recovery Parition I was referring to is actually called Factory Image (that HP had on the desktop).

 

Pardon my ignorance with Ghost, how do I create a Ghost Recovery Disk?

 

And just for my knowledge, formating the drive and this giving it a letter drive before the Ghost copy has created this issue?

 

Thanks,

Ganesh

5

Except for the drive letter problem, you must have done everything right since the system does indeed try to boot.

 

So yes, if you want to start over you can do the same as you did before, just before you do the drive copy go into disk management and delete the partition on the new drive so the whole thing is "unallocated".

 

If you want to try to fix the new drive, then you can follow my instructions above in my second post.

 

Whatever you think is easier.

Dave

6
ghost_gw wrote:

 

And just for my knowledge, formating the drive and this giving it a letter drive before the Ghost copy has created this issue?

 

Correct, giving the new drive a letter before you did the copy drive is what caused the problem

That caused windows to become F instead of C on the new drive and windows fails to work.

 

As for the recovery disk, if you purchased Ghost in a retail package, then your installation CD is also a bootable recovery disk.

If you bought the product online and downloaded it then you should have got a second download link to the recovery disk.

If you don't have a recovery disk you can get one here:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/norton-support/jsp/help-solutions.jsp?docid=20091016094409EN&lg=english&ct=united+states&product=home&version=1&pvid=f-home&entsrc=redirect_pubweb

 

Dave

7
ghost_gw wrote:

And just for my knowledge, formating the drive and this giving it a letter drive before the Ghost copy has created this issue?

 

Ganesh,

 

It is not formatting that is the problem. You can have an unformatted partition with a drive letter and Ghost Copy Drive will fail. It is the presence of a drive letter on the target partition that causes failure. If the target partition is formatted but doesn't have a drive letter then Copy Drive will succeed.

8

I'm replacing my 250GB disk with a 500 GB one on my desktop running Vista. Using Norton Ghost 15 I tried the following steps to clone the disk:

 

 1. Connected the new disk and using Disk Management initialized and formated it - Right-click on the "Unallocated" space and click "New Simple Volume....". Then in the "New Simple Volume Wizard" window clicled the "Next" button in the  "Specify Volume Size" window to accept the default volume size which is the  entire drive.  Selected the "Next" button in the "Assign Drive Letter or Path"  window to select the default drive letter, which was marked as "F"

 2. In Ghost, used Copy my Drive. Slected the source drive, checked the Show Hidden Drives box on the top right corner. Selected the destination drive. Selected "Set drive active (for booting OS)" check box in the "Advanced Options" window,  and also the "Copy MBR" check box. Then clicked Finish

 

3. When the process was finished, shutdown the computer, unplugged the power and SATA cables from both the drives and plugged the cables from the old drive to the new drive.

 

4. When I start the computer, it goes through the Vista startup screen and gets to the Log In screen. Then it shows Preparing your desktop on the screen. After that I get a light blue screen and nothing happens.

 

The old disk has a recovery image partition thaI I did not copy. And I realized that I did not select Expand Drive to fill Unalloacted space option. Also, I formatted the drive before initiating the clone.

 

Would appreciate how I can go about fixing this.

 

Thanks