Ghost image and booting trouble

JC · 3 Apr 2008 at 20:54

Using Ghost2003 in Dos im trying to:

Copy a system partition 10gb, (partition 1 of 2) from hard drive A (120gb)
To a 10gb partition on new hard drive B (750gb)

Firstly I created an image of the partition from A and ghosted it back onto B, then removed drive A from the machine. However when I power the machine with only drive B connected, the computer says "disk error" obviously missing some boot table information.

Do I clone the entire disk A to disk B? I won't cause any problems if I import non-identical sized hard drives?

Thanks

Delvis · 3 Apr 2008 at 20:57

Probably one of them things you just have to 'try' so to speak...

What's left on the first drive after the 10gb? Might be worth just cloning the entire disc over, then deleting that second partition on the new drive...?

Can't say I've done what your trying on Ghost to be fair, could try it with a newer version perhaps?

davethe11 · 3 Apr 2008 at 21:22

its possible that the boot.ini file specifies the windows installation on parition 0 of disk 0 (I think the numbering begins at zero), perhaps you have HDD B as a secondary drive still (is it IDE? You might need to move it to the same IDE channel and set the jumper as the drive you removed. If sata it may be plugged into a secondary sata port, would plug drive B into the same channel that A was in). This may result in the boot.ini file correctly locating the boot partition (I may be well off here though).

Bobster · 3 Apr 2008 at 21:45

Is the partition active?
Make a windows 98 book disk, boot to a command prompt and use the fdisk command. If the partition is active...fine, if not activate it.

After that, exit fdisk, and do a fdisk /mbr command.

IAmATeaf · 4 Apr 2008 at 12:43

When you use Ghost to just copy a partition is doesn't seem to copy over bits of the disk that are used to do the actual boot, it assumes the disk is in the correct state hence why you've only copied over a partition. Easiest thing to do would be to copy the entire disk over and then restore it. You can resize the parts when you do the restore and then remove the second part it if it's not needed.