Problems Ghosting a boot drive

Pipe & Slippers · 5 Dec 2010 at 22:34

Deciding I needed to replace my 5yr old hard drive, I bought a nice new one (thank you MM)

Currently XP boots from a 20GB partition (no, I have no idea why I made it this small)
The rest of the drive is used for programs and storage on a single partition

On the new drive, I want to make the c: partition bigger and thought I could partition it, say 50/415 and using Ghost, clone the 20GB partition to the empty 50GB partition on the new disk (and do the same with the other partition)

The problem is I can't seem to boot from the new drive - I thought the big feature of Ghost was that it did an exact copy, so in theory I should just be able to clone, unplug the old drive, and boot from the new one...or is the problem that I have changed the partition size?

Anyone give me any pointers?

I'm using Ghost 2003 and booting from a floppy to run it

Thanks

Destination · 6 Dec 2010 at 14:18

Is there an mbr on the cloned drive telling the OS it is an active partition and the boot partition?

When swapping drives most commonly an issue can be due to that, its also why when people do fresh installs they should only ever do it with one drive in palce to ensure the mbr is on their boot drive and not somewhere silly that might be removed later.

Ah you said XP... hmmm. Unsure.

Hagar · 6 Dec 2010 at 15:23

You possibly do need to make the partition active in administrative tools | disk manager. Connect both drives and see. While you are at it, a 100Gb partition may be better unless you strictly control what is on C:

andy.

Pipe & Slippers · 6 Dec 2010 at 21:34

Thanks for the replies

I have just made the new partition active and rather than getting 'no boot device' I get 'NTLDR is missing'...so that's a step forward...just have to find out how to remedy that...

Pipe & Slippers · 6 Dec 2010 at 23:03

After a bit of messing around, I find that ntdlr and ntdetect.com are not present

I boot from the windows cd and copy them over to my new c: drive

On booting I then then get 'invalid boot.ini file', but it continues, no windows thermometer bar (or scrolling bar or whatever) and at the windows welcome screen I just get the calming blue background and the windows xp logo ie. no user account selection and it hangs

Well, where can I find my current boot.ini file - on my old c: drive? No. For some bizarre reason ntdlr, ntdetect.com and the boot.ini file on my old disk are not on the c (boot) partition but d

So I copy them over from the old disk to the new one in the appropriate location

Booting now gives me hal.dll is missing or corrupt...grrrr

I'm now wondering if I should just use another cloning tool that'll actually work....further update to follow tomorrow

Raumarik · 6 Dec 2010 at 23:46

are you booting from the drive you want to image then imaging it to the new partition? I'd personally boot from external USB drive/pen drive and image the partitions when they aren't otherwise in use.

Image both partitions across then boot off the new C-drive although if those files are on your D-drive you might be better off doing a wipe/reinstall just to sort this out for future backups etc.

Pipe & Slippers · 7 Dec 2010 at 22:31

I just cloned both partitions on the old disk to 2 partitions on the new disk, but am having similar problems

Halfmad - when you say image do you mean clone, or do you think that I should try taking a image and restoring that to the new drive?

ta

Pipe & Slippers · 8 Dec 2010 at 23:19

Finally - success...but not with Ghost

I remembered that I had got a copy of Acronis True Image 10 lying around so tried that and it worked first time. The only slightly annoying thing about it was although it apparently offers you the option to resize partitions on the new disk, you can't resize one partition smaller and then resize one bigger. I ended up using the proportionate sizing and got a 65GB and 400GB set up

A couple of reasons why I think I had problems with Ghost:

As above, ntdlr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini were somehow all residing on the d partition, not the boot partition. I have no idea how that happened - although cloning both partitions should have solved this
Just before using Acronis, I remembered that a long time ago, I'd moved the pagefile and placed it on my f drive which was on a separate disk...which I didn't have connected after the cloning when I tried to boot from the new drive. I reinstated it to the c drive before cloning - I'm not sure whether xp would just have created a new pagefile if it couldn't find one

Thanks for your help