Norton Ghost Grief

I have a 40 GB drive I want to put in a higher spec machine. Just sticking it in there won't work, the computer won't boot into the OS (Windows XP Pro).

So I tried ghosting the contents to the dexisting 120 GB disk. Won't work.

Not via my Rev drive, not via a Partition to Partition and not via a Disk to Disk image. Not on a formatted with nor without partitions.

It's f****g pissing me off now wasting two nights.

Any ideas? Is it possible at all to ghost two non-identical spec drives?

I just need my 40 GB (2 partitions) copied to the 120 GB drive.

I was expecting to just do that (seems to work in Ghost) and then boot to it but it's having none of it at all whatsoever.

Any ideas?

 

I would try this: Put the 40G HHD back in it's original machine and (in windows) uninstall all extra hardware (modems, usb stuff, printers etc), one at a time. After you have uninstalled each piece of HW, turn the machine off and physically take that HW out. Restart the machine and continue with the next one. Now on your new machine, take out the HHD and any other hardware that'a "extra" (after-market video extra cd drives) and disconnect any other devices (printers etc) and install the 40G HHD. With a *bare* machine, it should boot to the *old* HHD and then you can follow normal procedures for installing the hardware you took out of the new machine. If it doesn't boot check the BIOS and make sure the boot order is correct. Also it might not boot if you have a manufacturer's pre-installed version of Windows that will only boot if it finds their hardware. Hope some of this helps you.

 

Yeah but then I'm risking a working harddisk.

I failed in the upgrade but at least I could stick the 40GB back in the old (actually quite alright) box and have it back exactly how it was.

I probably just stick the RAM from the higher spec in mine and live with it.

Thanks for the suggestions though, might do just that one day.

 

I couldn't get Norton ghost to work for me either, I gave up. It was included with systemworks but seems to suck big time and is useless. You can't even uninstall like a normal program....

You shouldn't have brought back the memories !!! arghhh!!

 

It sounds like you're not running the same hardware configuration on the destination PC. Because of this, Windows will not boot.

To get around this, you can use a utility called sysprep. As long as your HAL is the same on the reference and destination PCs, you should be fine. That document may be a bit overwhelming at first, but it's not so bad. There's a gui tool that can create your sysprep.inf file which is mentioned in that document.

 

You've got no idea how useful Ghost (the older versions) is then. Ghost is likely the best application you can fit on a single floppy (well, now on 2 floppies).

Though the latest version of ghost sucks big time. Symantic really fucked that one up.

 

They're not identical but near enough. I was expecting it to at least boot and then find some new hardware, install it/update registry and get on with it.

I'll read that doc, thanks!

 

And if you're confused about it reading: automating deployment of XP; sysprep is normally used by enterprises to automate OS installation. You would normally install XP from CD, make all of your configuration changes to the desktop and other things, then run sysprep, then take a ghost image of the box. This way you can deploy that same image down to like-hardware configurations.

Good luck.

 

I figured it could make an actual copy of one harddrive to another so I could upgrade to a larger drive and remove the old drive without reinstalling all software and copying over all data. I guess I was wrong. A simple disc copy that copied every detail from one to the other would make that an easy swap.

 

That's exactly what it's supposed to do. What version of ghost (or system works) were you running? If it's Ghost 9 (the latest I believe) I simply don't care for it because it removed alot of the basic functionality Ghost was built on. Hell, it doesn't even let you make bootable floppies like all the old versions did.

 

XP is packed with anti-piracy features, like recording various hardware specs and serial numbers change one and you have to re-registor the copy, change them all and ......

 

You re-register if you change them all. But Microsoft takes the MAC address of the NIC and keeps that as your unique id. Re-registration isn't that big of a deal.

 

You've given me an idea. Connect the the old 40G drive and the new drive as slaves to another computer with it's own HDD. Format the new drive, then xcopy the entire old drive to the new one. I've never done something like this, but it could work

Don't they limit how many times you can re-register?

 

I've used the same key for years now. After a certain number of times, you will not be able to register online and will need to call them.

 

Ahhh thank you.