I have and old Micron system, and I am installing a 40GB drive. The bios/motherboard does not support drives over 8GB, so the drive comes up as 8GB, but through the Atapi.sys that is available after SP4, NT sees and uses the full 40GB drive. I am having problems ("Invalid Drive Details") viewing images of partitions from this drive creatred with Norton Ghost, even though the image files pass the integrity check. Based on similar messages from a drive corrupted by Ghost Explorer, I am assuming the MBR (i.e. CHS, partition type) is not what Ghost Explorer expects. Symantec support was useless on this matter, looking to place blame (after corrupting one hard drive) as opposed to truely trying to understand the problem. Furthermore, I can take an image file, extract it to a partition on a 6.4GB drive that automatically correctly displays in bios (i.e. C:13328 H:15 S:63), and create an image of the subsequent partition that is viewable.

Micron has information on the associated bios (405) at the provided Homepage URL. Although NT has no problem with the drive, I decided to modify the bios for the drive per the above Micron tip, from C:16383 H:16 S:63, to C:17475 H:15 S:63. I can now successfully use Ghost Explorer to view image files, and NT has no problem formatting/partitioning and using the drive, just as before. However, the drive does not appear on the NT boot up screen. My question is, what is the significance of the drive failing to appear on the boot screen, as long as NT can successfully use the drive? Also, even though NT can use the drive, due to the CHS change should I still perform a low level (i.e. DOS) format? My main concern however, is the failure for the drive to appear on the boot screen. I would not want the above CHS change to cause a problem with a subsequent application at a later date.

Thanks in advance.

David

I think that this is down to the age of the system BIOS. The BIOS itself does not appear to support large drives and possibly some system calls are in effect by-passong the BIOS but other call make use of the BIOS which cannot handle the drive properly.

If you know the maker and exact model of the motherboard I would go to their web-site and see if there is a BIOS update available. If there is you'll need to download the appropriate file and MAKE SURE that you have the right one BEFORE proceeding. Stick the update program on a DOS diskette and boot the system from that and run the update. Once the BIOS can correctly detect the drive you problems should go away.

OK so you get past the issue of getting good drive images.

What good is this?

The other half of this equation is restoring. If you are running on this outdated of hardware, you will not be able to restore these images to a new system and have NT work.

Ghost images are NOT a replacement for backups or ERD's.

Not sure what you mean NT boot up screen doesn't show the hard drive. The NT boot menua never shows what drive, only what is going to load. Clearly the boot.ini entry works.

Concerning changing the CHS [which can effect the mbr], you should fdisk, remove and recreate the partitions and then format again. You should do the NT partition creation thru the NT install.

"The BIOS itself does not appear to support large drives and possibly some system calls are in effect by-passong the BIOS but other call make use of the BIOS which cannot handle the drive properly."

I upgraded the bios once, but it has been a while (~4 years). There are also motherboard limitations. I have contacted Micron on this, but, considering the systems age, I am unsre if they will respond. Micron and the motherboard vendor (Micronics) I believe have farmed out bios replacements to an outfit that charges for the update. However, I will look into this again.

"The other half of this equation is restoring. If you are running on this outdated of hardware, you will not be able to restore these images to a new system and have NT work."

What I should have said was, I can take an image file that is unviewable with Ghost Explorer, and extract it to a partition on the 40GB withtout any problem (i.e. properties shows exact number of files and GB used). Furthermore, if I extract it to the 6.4GB drive, I can create a viewable image, which only proves the the problem is associated with the 8GB (or 32GB) limitation and appears to only affect Ghost Explorer. The unknown is whether or not I can extract an image of a boot partition and boot from it. This will be tested today.

"Ghost images are NOT a replacement for backups or ERD's."

Correct. This is a 7 year old system. I am preparing for a new system, whose backup program will possibly not be compatable with NT 4.0. I wanted to ensure important data was available in an easily restorable format. The NT OS is for the most part irrelevant since it can be reinstalled in an hour.

"Not sure what you mean NT boot up screen doesn't show the hard drive."

When I boot up, just after the memory check is performed and before NTDETECT runs, I normally see the HDD model and serial numbers displayed. After the CHS change, this information was not displayed.

P.S.
I should have added that your posts gave me the information I needed. Thanks.

Glad to help.

The not showing the drive in the bios bootup summary screen is of concern. Fdisk and format won't help in this matter since their effect comes after the bios's recongnition of the hardware.

Sounds like you have things under control. I see some pretty wacky stuff around here so I wanted to make sure you didn't think ghost was backup.

This 40gig drive, is it a addon to the system or is it the primary drive? I thought it was a add on since you mention service pack 4 Atapi.sys driver.

If you are ghosting to this 40gig drive and expanding the ghost image to larger then 7.8gig for system/boot you are going to run into the bios boot limit bug. Your system will not be able to boot if the boot files get moved beyond 7.8gig. This is a well known and documented issue since 1999

NT out of the box can only install to 4gig. Workaround is to install NT with a 125meg primary dos partition and then a preformatted ntfs partition using the rest of the drive. This prevents the bios boot limit by trapping the boot files on the 125meg system partition while allowing the boot partition to occupy the rest of the drive on native ntfs.

Along with your bios issues you could be compounding things with the bios boot limit bug.

FYI and best of luck!