Hard Drive Cloning

[salem2000]

Hi

Have a problem with Cloning my Hard Drive.

Running Windows XP Home and Using Norton Ghost.

As part of an upgrade, I cloned my "C" drive contents to a SATA drive with no problems. When I replace my old drive with the new, Win XP boots as normal until it gets to the Welcome Splash Screen the system then hangs until I restart manually. The system works perfectly with the old drive, and both drives tested as working.

The only thing I can think of that is preventing it from starting fully is some kind of hardware ID problem. (ie: the system is looking for the old H/Drives assignment number or ID) Does this sound right or am I just cluching at straws. I've used Ghost many times before to Image the drive as a backup in the event of falure, and restored the drive image without any problems. But this has me stumped.

Has anyone done this before, and is there something I've not done?

Salem.

 

[Igorian]

I would imagine the SATA drivers, or lack of them could be an issue. Have you tried a repair install?

 

[salem2000]

I would imagine the SATA drivers, or lack of them could be an issue. Have you tried a repair install?

Thanks for the reply Igoran

The drive is detecting correctly at boot, and when cloning drive all programs find it with no problems.

No, I've not tried a repair install, I wanted to see if anybody has come across this problem and might have a solution. Maybe will try that next.

I can't make a Ghost Disk as I don't have a floppy drive, otherwise I could try and use the Image backup to install the drive. Yes, I could install one, but there is nowhere near me that sells comp parts and Ghost does not give me the option to make one on a CD/DVD.

 

[Space cat]

This probably won't help much but I'll pass it on anyway. Two things:

1) I had a drive with three primary partitions on it: 98SE, 2000 and XP. I made ghost images of all three partitions. The first two could be ghosted back and worked perfectly. This didn't work with XP, even though no hardware had changed. All I'd done was make a mess of the updates and wanted to get back to the clean install state. My only theory is that XP hides something in the master boot record and this wasn't in the ghost image.

2) Much later I needed to use the 2000 image again. By now there were only two active partitions on the disk and I'd changed the sound card. When I ghosted the old 2000 image back it wouldn't work; it froze more or less as you've described. I can only assume that it got hung up over hardware changes.

I always run ghost from a floppy so I doubt very much whether this will solve your problem.

 

[MarkBarl]

The PC is detecting the drive at boot, but it would appear that when Xp tries to initialise it, it fails. This is likely to be due to the change of hardware. Cloning works best when the hardware is identical or at least very similar. Changing from an IDE drive to SATA is quite a fundamental change to the hardware environment which the OS is obviously having difficulty with. Use the repair install which should redetect all your hardware and re install all the system files. One small note though, if your XP is at Sp2 you may save some heartache by creating a custim install disk that includes the SP2 files. Instructions can be found here

 

[Igorian]

It's a common problem when cloning drives to systems with different HALs, in fact, it's not recommended at all.

Cloning, really, is just that. It's designed to allow those who have to build large numbers of identical machines, to build 1 and then replicate to the rest, rather than moving an entire O/S from an old system to a completely different one.

Performing a repair install, should, but it doesn't always work, reset the HAL to a basic level by replacing the system files with basic versions. It's probably the best way to tackle your problem, now that the drive is actually cloned.

It would have been better to install the base O/S, install all the apps. fresh and use the file and settings wizard to move the rest. There are applications which will, supposedly, move your entire applications too. I have had mixed experiences with such apps. and it really is a matter of trial and error.

 

[empip]

Some good stuff on Ghost at the Radified site.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1176321672

Their useful guide to Ghost.
http://ghost.radified.com/

 

[shamster]

can you run windows in Safe mode?

 

[salem2000]

Thanks to you all for the advice.

It turns out that the problem (according to Microsoft) was that when Windows found the drive when it was installed, it assigned it an ID number and as usual a drive letter in this case "D". When the drive was Cloned the new drive ID information remained the same, and as Windows was looking for the original drive info and could not find it, went belly up.

I tried a Repair install and this cured most of the problem, but some programs wouldn't run including Norton Ghost. However after reinstalling Ghost and removing any spare hard drives, I was able to fool the system into reinstalling from a ghost image I made to DVD before the saga started. Re-installed my backup h/drives and everything was as normal with no lost data.

If I had installed a floppy drive when I built the PC I would never have had this trouble, so there is still a use for floppy drives after all. I is daft that Norton Ghost would not allow me to make a bootable CD/DVD.

Once again Thanks for your help.

Salem.

 

[FozzieBear]

Although you have fixed you problem you can get ghost on a bootable CD/DVD. One option is called BartPE. If you go to their website http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/you can download and build a bootable ISO which can include a Ghost plug in amongst other valuable tools.
All you need is a genuine copy of XP or Server 2003 and the original Ghost licence which presumably you already have with your current software.
I use BartPE for cloning machines all the time and you can also slipstream in SATA drivers to allow you to boot and clone a SATA drive.
Regards
Fozzie