Norton Ghost and Drive Image problem

Jw_Leonhart

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Jul 29, 2002
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Ok I have a major problem here. Now I have just recieved my new replacement drive from Western Digital today and need to get all the information off my old one. Now I have been trying a direct copy with Norton Ghost 7 Enterprise Edition but when I try to load windows from the new drive it says that windows has some kind of file error and can't find a registry that is needed.

With Drive Image it will take 5hours 10minutes and unfortunatly last time it did not work. So any suggestions I would appreciate.

Thank you.
 

Toejam31

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Dec 31, 2007
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It sounds like that when you used Drive Image, the image you created was not valid. Did you span the image and burn it to CD-R disks ... and if so, <i>idirectly</i> to the CD's, or did you burn the image to the hard drive, and then to the CD-R disks?

The reason that I'm asking is because there is a high probability of data corruption when burning directly to the CD-R disks. Whenever I create an image, I always first place the spanned image files on the hard drive, and <i>then</i> burn the files on the CD-R disks. During the process, I make sure the image is valid when initially created, and then I re-check the image files on the CD-R disks to again be certain that the image is valid.

I use Nero to transfer the files to the CD's, and use the option within the program to check the validity of the data as it is burned.

This gives me three checks of the data.

How did you install and partition the new hard drive? While I don't know if this is applicable in your situation, but if you used the Data Lifeguard Tools from Western Digital to partition the drive, you may have some problems due to the way the utility writes the partition tables. This installs EZ-BIOS, and must be removed for many programs like Drive Image to function correctly. If so, post back, and I'll send you a link on how to remove EZ-BIOS.

If you used FDISK to create the partition on the drive, remember that the partition <i>must</i> be the same size of larger than the imaged partition.

Comments:

1.) I'd run a thorough scan of the older hard drive before imaging, to check for file system errors.

2.) A possible solution could also be to use a partitioning program like Partition Magic to create a new partition on the older drive. Then you could back up your data to the new partition, and when imaging, place the image file(s) in the new partition. Afterwards, you could install the older hard drive as a slave, and use the Drive Image floppies to start the system. Then you could access the image files, and install them on the new drive.

Note: Don't try to install the image file on a blank drive that has not yet been partitioned.

I wrote a <A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=39&t=184&s=94b6d0591c2f3cf8022705a3bed65979" target="_new">Drive Image Faqs</A> a while back that might help:

Toey

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Codesmith

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Are you running Windows XP?

Windows XP won't clone, this is by design. XP does some special vodoo to your hard drive that is lost when you image it with Ghost.

You can read about this at microsofts knowledge base. But ignore with their instructions.

There is what I do to successfully move an XP installation to a new hard drive.

1) Make sure you are using the latest version of ghost. I use Ghost 2003 version 760. If you are using a boot floopy make sure you have two or three as floopys are very unreliable.

2) Prepare the target hard drive by starting a Windows XP installation. Let XP format and start to install. Stop it when it starts copying files to the hard drive.

3) Once you put whatever voodoo XP needs into a partion you never have to do it again, even if your format the partion. However if you delete the partition and create a new one the voodoo is gone.

4) Ok now you are all set. Use Ghost to copy your OS partition from your old hard drive or from an image file and it should start up fine.