Hi all... Recently, I got a job to upgrade a hard drive in a PC from 80gb to 250gb. Took an image of the 80gb with ghost, and placed it on a partition on the 250gb. Now neither disk will boot!! Something crazy happened with the extraction to the 250gb, when I boot in with ERD, i can see all the folders, but they're empty! The 250gb wont boot at all, so I left it aside, went back to the original disk. When trying to boot from this, i get pci.sys file missing or corrupt. So went in with RecCons and replaced the file, now the boot just freezes on the first WinLogo screen. Even booting in safe mode, it hangs on fltmgr.sys file. Never come across this before. I ran all the usual diagnostics on the hard disk, and did an SFC through RecCons etc... Also had a look at all boot files thru ERD, everything looks in order... If anyone has encountered this before, your help would be greatly appreciated. Bosey

IDE or SATA drives? What version of Ghost? Did you start Ghost from inside Windows?

IDE Drives. Ghost 2003 - booted from startup. Bosey

I'm guessing you have two separate but related issues. First is the original drive. The only way I know of that Ghost 2003 could affect the ability of the original drive to boot would be if the boot partition is no longer marked active. This happens if you clone to a new drive. The new drive is marked as active and that designation is removed from the old. The second issue is with the 250GB drive. If the computer BIOS is not 48 bit LBA compliant or WinXP original was in use on the old drive data corruption could be the result. Reconnect the 250GB by itself. Check the startup screens to verify the drive is properly identified by both the model and FULL capacity. If that happens then run fdisk to see if the boot partition is marked as active. Do not use fdisk to do anything other than checking the partitions and marking the boot partition active. If the old drive had WinXP original, which is not 48 bit compliant, then there may be a fix for than. There is a registry entry that will allow the use of the entire drive. However, that doesn't seem to be your problem. I haven't used ERD so it don't know anything about it. That said there are conditions that can make folders appear empty when they aren't. You could use a live version of linux to see if the folders contain data. Knoppix is one I have used. That should get you started or maybe solve the problems. If you used the clone function in Ghost then check the old drive to see if the boot partition is marked as active. Also run fixmbr and fixboot from the repair console on the original drive.

OtheHill sorry but cloning never removes the active bit from any drive. You can have all your drives first primary partitions active but its only the one listed in the bios as boot will boot. Only inside Windows and using disk management do you run into the situation of if you make one partition active does windows remove the active bit from another drive. First problem I see here is a drive image put on a partition. You ghost partition to image or drive to image. If the 250 disk is partitioned then the ghosting needs to be partition to image. Since these are ide drives we have the master/slave issue. A 80gig drive can have issues addressing a newer 250gig drive whereas the 250 can address the 80. To overcome these issues its best to have both drives as master with each on one ide channel. This drive addressing could be what is effecting the boot of the 80gig. Example of Oxymoron: Person who is pro life and anti sex education. Education is key to prevention. Prevent conception you prevent abortion. Abstinence training clearly isn't working.

Wanderer Thanks for correcting me. After reading your response #4 I thought about this issue and realized why I thought what I did. I had Ghost 2003 and used it for some time before upgrading hardware to include SATA hard drives. I had problems with Ghost freezing soon after starting to make a partition image. I couldn't boot back in WinXP after that. I discovered that the boot partition on my SATA drive was no long marked as active. I ultimately discovered why this was happening. The build I had did not support SATA drives. I obtained an update to Ghost and now it works with SATA drives. Anyway, in order to fix my WinXP partition I needed to mark the partition active and run the repair console using fixboot and fixmbr. All this was caused by Ghost creating a virtual partition and marking it as the active bootable partition. Going back to the OP's issue I think cloning was used instead of imaging. I can't see any other reason the old disk won't boot. Of course I assumed the OP had reset the cabling and jumpers correctly.

Ok, the Ghosting was done OK. I'm doing 3-4 a day at work. Disk to Image then Disk from Image to restore it. I get that, this has never happened before. What I really need is a fix, i desperately need to get this hard disk booting again.... My latest attempt: Put a new 80GB IDE into the machine, installed XP, booted up, grand. Set original 80GB as primary master and new 80GB with fresh install of XP as secondary master. Booted into RecCons and tried copying over the file. Seemed to copy OK, but still same thing happening. Bosey