Can't get brand new hard drive to image

[Con]

Hi there.

I have a PC with a 20gb HDD in it. Now, this 20gb drive is in 2 partitions, The first partition (Primary/Active) is 8GB.

I have purchased a brand new 9GB seagate drive (I guess it would be unformatted when i got it), The idea was to Ghost the 8gb partition onto the new hard drive.

I used norton ghost to do Partition to Partition, and it said sucessfull etc, so i powered off, left just the new 9gb drive in the machine. Put it on the primary master. set the machines boot sequence to IDE-0 first. then i restarted, and the BIOS said Searching for boot record on IDE-0... OK

so it found one, but then it just hung there, the drive was still spinning but was doing absolutely sweet fanny adams .

I've now FDISKED, deleted all partitions on the new drive, formatted it and I am trying again with ghost, but if it doesn't work i don't know what to do?

Anyone got any ideas on possible reasons why I cannot boot from this drive?

Conrad

[Uncle Bob]

Try cloning it and keep boot sequence as is and booting and looking at it in Win Explorer to see if it's ok. Sounds like it wasn't fdisk'd tho.

[Con]

I will do if this fails, it will finish in a few mins, but why would it matter if it hadn't been Fdisk'ed? surely ghost would copy the relevant partition information onto the drive?!

Con

[Uncle Bob]

I cannot answer that, my friend! I just have my meager experience! I've tried exactly that and found it to be so for me!

I use Clone from Ghost to backup a WIN installation on my tweaker computer and when the main drive is kaput, I boot from HDD1 instead of 0 and clone back and am off to the races. I tried it with a brand new drive and it no workie till I got into DOS and FDISK'd and FORMATted the new drive. I must admit allot of this is still a mystery to me! LOL I just keep plugging away and sometimes get there inspite of myself anyway by sheer determination.

[Con]

Lol, fair play Uncle Bob, I know what you mean about things being a mystery, but it would take up too much time to be able to explain how every piece of hardware interacts with software etc. However, the 2nd ghosting did not work! OK, so I booted off the old drive and sure i could see the new drive and all the files, I checked the usual stuff like boot.ini, then I decided a bit of logical thinking was in order!

Well once the BIOS tells the hard drive it needs a boot record, the drive must return the master boot record back to the hard drive controller? Well, I re-wrote the MBR in dos (FDISK /MBR) and rebooted and it did the trick.

If only I had thought logically and tried that before reghosting for the 2nd time I always waste so much time when I come to trouble shoot things, and I always end up solving them with a 5 second solution after trying the 1 hr solutions first :nervous: Nevermind huh? As long as it works now

By the way the FDISK /MBR command is not supported by Microsoft for anyone who is reading this message, so don't moan at me if you try this and can't boot .

Con

[piccoLEW]

why all this ghosting? why couldnt u just have both HDDs on at the same time? then instead of doin all that fancy ghost stuff, just go into linux's file manager just copy what was on the partition to the new hard drive?

or is this bein a bit too simple minded?

[Uncle Bob]

Why? Wellllllllllllll, because I ain't running with the penguins for starters! LOL!

[piccoLEW]

i thought conrad started this thread about the problem?
i was under the impression he (or she?) is using linux.

ok ok, just have both hdd's in at same time, and in "my computer" or whatever file manager your OS uses copy the contents of the partition of the 1st hard drive to the 2nd hard drive? then you can wipe the partition off the 1s hard drive and vòìlâ...

can this be applied instead?

[Uncle Bob]

Originally posted by piccoLEW
i thought conrad started this thread about the problem?
i was under the impression he (or she?) is using linux.

ok ok, just have both hdd's in at same time, and in "my computer" or whatever file manager your OS uses copy the contents of the partition of the 1st hard drive to the 2nd hard drive? then you can wipe the partition off the 1s hard drive and vòìlâ...

can this be applied instead?

Well, before you start badmouthing someones software, perhaps having the facts would help.

why all this ghosting? why couldnt u just have both HDDs on at the same time? then instead of doin all that fancy ghost stuff, just go into linux's file manager just copy what was on the partition to the new hard drive?

Norton Ghost doesn't work in Linux.

Simply copying in "whatever file manager your OS uses" also shows that if you are trying to help, perhaps having the facts would help.

Now, you cannot copy a hard drive contents to a workable state in windows. The boot sector is not included. Ghost and Drive Image and several other disk managers ALL use DOS to access the ebtire contents of the drive to accurately copy it. You can program them in windows, but the actual work takes place in DOS.

[Uncle Bob]

Want to learn about Ghost? Look here. For the avid overclocker, it's a godsend. It does, however, only work in windows.

[Con]

Lol now now ladies

I do have a Linux box, but I also have a Windows Box, as you can see from my signature

Uncle bob has the reasons for me using Ghost, it is invaluable. You can't clone a partition within windows!.

Because my disk was raw the master boot record was not carried over correctly from the old drive, as the drives are different in size (cylinders heads etc). So i recreated the boot record and all was well

Con