I've been teating my hair out and need help please. Today I decided to back up my daughter's PC by making a Norton Ghost Image. I've done this before but this time it has looked up my machine before making ther image. Now my machine gets as far as "Checking for boot on IDE-0 .. OK" and then hangs. I've tried the usual XP Recovery (Fixmbr etc) to no avail. Can anyone help? So much for making back-ups eh! Rgs Graham

How to do a system repair.--Boot from the xp cd and go past the recovery console to the install menu. Select repair the existing installation. You won't lose any data except the xp updates.You MUST install at least SP1 and all the updates for security reasons. Unless you have a slipstream sp1 cd you will have to d/l sp1 and all subsequent updates. Be sure the firewall and A/V is active before going online as you will be susceptible to sasser and msblaster. If you don't want SP2 go to autopatcher.com and d/l SP1 and subsequent updates.

Not many choices left, if it won't even boot to safe mode you always have the repair install or over the top as it is also called.

Remove all USB devices and see if it will boot.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand what you wrote. What does "this time it has looked up my machine before making ther image" mean. What has your machine got to do with backing up your daughters ?

If I am reading Graham's post correctly then I suspect he is attempting to run Ghost from his machine to back up his daughter's machine over a network connection. It also sounds like you saved her image to your C:\ partition. What is the scenario? The easier way to do it by creating a Ghost boot disk and then run it from the daughter's floppy drive. Additionally, NT OSs use two partitions: one is the system partition and the other is the boot partition. Quite often they are one in the same where the OS is installed on the C: drive. The system partition is always the C: drive or C: partition if that is the active partition. Those files are: NTLDR BOOT.INI NTDETECT.COM Two additional files reside there too: BOOTSECT.DOS (needed for dual boot with Win9x) NTBOOTDD.SYS (needed when system partition is on SCSI disk with BIOS enabled) They would be located on the root of the system partition eg. C:\ So, if you are ghosting a NT partition that is not also the system partition then it will not ghost the system files that are needed to boot up that partition. HTH Bryan