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I've recently had some trouble while trying to use Norton Ghost to copy a "dying" hard drive to a new one. After the old drive successfully “ghosts” to the new one, I attach the new drive to the computer and get an NTLDR error (it says it's missing). I've tried to run a repair on the new drive, but it doesn't change anything.
The old drive was formatted in FAT32 and had two partitions. One was a system partition and the other was a restore I believe. I've tried “ghosting” just the system partition, but I get the same results. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!
I don't know what version of Ghost you are using.
I do this with both drives on the IDE. I use Ghost 2003 and run it from a boot diskette in PC DOS. I CLONE the source disk to another HDD. When I do it, I can boot into the OS off the cloned drive.
I do this weekly with most of my computers so that I have a back up of the HDD in case the original HDD goes south. I have the backup HDDs on power switches so that I can power them down after a backup.
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I've tried Norton Ghost 8 and 9 I believe. I'm starting to think something else is wrong though. Even if I try to install a fresh copy of Windows XP on a new hard drive it won't work. It just says "NTLDR: couldn't open drive,multi(0)disk(0)rdi...".
The strange thing is that the second I throw the old drive back in everything works fine. Granted, that hard drive sounds horrible and I doubt it will last much longer, but it does work.
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For years and years I swore by Norton Ghost, until Xtra Putrid came along, and then I began to have problems. Mine are also 2003.
I finally switched to Acronic True Image.
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Both drives are IDE. The original drive is a 30 GB Quantum and the drive I'm ghosting that one to is an 80 GB Seagate. The Seagate is new and in perfect working order. I might try using some different software to copy the old drive to the new one. Couldn't hurt I guess.
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So, you are using Disk to Disk with both drives connected.
What happens is the cloned copy is given a new drive letter (let's say D:\). When you try to use that drive it is looking for NTLDR on drive C:\. You don't have a drive C:\.
You need a third partition to work with that is large enough to accomodate the image.
Go disk to Image onto that third partition.
Hook up the new drive as the first bootable drive.
Using the Ghost floppy; boot to it and then go Image to Disk.The new partition will be assigned C:\ and NTLDR will be found there.
Do be aware that Image to Disk will reproduce what you had on the original disk and at the same size. So if the origianl had two partitions with a total of 30Gb then the new hard drive will be the same with 50 of the 80Gb available as unallocated space.
Using the new drive the hidden partition will not be usable due to it not being the same as the original.
What may be a better choice would be to use Partition to Image and then Image to Partition. Cloning only the C:\ drive.
Of course when you try to boot to that new drive the boot.ini will be incorrect so you will need to fix the mbr or edit it.
I never tried it but if you have Ghost installed then you may be able to use Ghost Explorer to edit the boot.ini while the second hard drive is connected and after you perform the Partition to Image to that second hard drive.
HTH
Bryan
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Thank you for the reply, Bryan. I'll give some of your ideas a try. I just find it odd that this is the first time I've had this problem. I've "ghosted" hundreds of drives and have booted up from the cloned copies every time without having to alter anything. In the end I blame this problem on the fact that the computer I'm working on is a Compaq. It might not be a valid reason, but it sounds good.
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The original HDD from a COmpaq may have ROM/BOOT partition that isn't being cloned by your current efforts.
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I'm not if it's the original drive, but it very well might be. Any idea how to copy that section of the hard drive if that is the case? I mean, I can't even load a fresh copy of anything on this computer. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Maybe I'll just put Linux on it...
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