Ghost copy has messed up my MBR.
I got here thinking that I could use Ghost 14 (I am an old ghost user) to clone a hard drive from a different computer to a new drive in my computer. My wife’s laptop drive is very slow, so I am upgrading it to a 7200rpm disk, and I thought that using Ghost on my desktop would be a perfect solution to moving over to the new drive; so I connected both drives and downloaded the user manual.
I should have been warned that the user guide is very sparse, and doesn’t even mention anything about copying a drive from a different computer (and the copy destined to go back into that computer) but I remembered my good 'ol experience with ghost 7.5 and thought it would be the same deal just in windows. I checked the copy MBR option and re-size and 10 minutes later it was done (I have a hugely fast desktop). I shutdown the desktop to remove the drives and upon reboot found that ghost had modified my desktop’s bootloader; it was offering me the option of Vista x64 (my desktop OS) or Windows XP (the drive that I had copied).
I tried booting the copied drive in the laptop, and no joy, it dosn’t work either. So I started the process again, deleted the volume from the new drive, copied the system partition to the new drive figuring that I can just use the recovery console on the OS cd to rebuild the MBR later tonight. Copy completes in 7 min. I’ll have to wait and see if I can actually get this drive to work, and I am going to end up doing a recovery-console repair to fix my stupid bootloader that Ghost screwed up.
Is there any supported way to do what I was trying to do (copying a hard drive sourced and destined for a different computer than is running ghost 14) or is this a purposeful omission from the documentation?
If you are reading this before you buy, Ghost 14 is not a disk-to-disk cloning solution … search the forum for “ghost 14 copy” and “ghost 14 clone” (anymore … the old versions were great). Ghost 14 does work very well at backing up a computer; I backup my system nightly to my NAS and offsite to a friend’s house which works perfectly.
Has anyone gotten a refund for Ghost 14?