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Thread ID: 35957 2003-07-26 13:24:00 Ghosting XP Crunn (1068) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
163075 2003-07-26 13:24:00 For a start, does has anyone ever Ghosted XP successfully ?
I dual boot - Win98 and XP, works fine. Various reasons for doing so. I decided to upgrade the drive with XP on to a larger one - 30 -> 120. Fine, set up the partitrions I wanted and then Ghosted (Symantec) the old XP partition to the newer, larger one. I left the old drive on the 2 IDE channel just to see if the new one worked. Booted up fine (so I thought). Disconnected the old drive and plugged in the CD-ROMS. Rebooted. XP loade to the Welcome screen and then sat there. Tried leaving it - on a whim - no go. Mumble, mumble - glad I didn't wipe the old drive whilst still connected. Connected old drive and just for good measure rebooted XP. Worked fine. Much puzzlement. Then I noticed, just by chance, that in fact it had finished the boot process using the old drive on the second IDE channel !! It had redistributed the drive letters in it's favour !! Is this MS protection paranoia ? Does anyone have any ideas ??

Thanks

Crunn
Crunn (1068)
163076 2003-07-27 09:27:00 Maybe the MBR needs repairing on the new ghosted XP installation to remove any traces of the old dual booting system.

Someone else may have a better idea ...
Jen C (20)
163077 2003-07-27 11:14:00 Check your boot.ini file. Looks like it might have been booting the old copy with both drives connected? JohnD (509)
163078 2003-07-27 11:15:00 Sorry - should have read properly - the welcome screen was up.

Try booting from your CD and doing a repair?
JohnD (509)
163079 2003-07-27 12:31:00 I have successfully ghosted XP but I used Powerquest DriveImage. Strangely when I did it, it wouldn't boot either, Maybe something to do with the Master Boot Record being deleted or something. Anyway, I did a new install of XP (to get the MBR back or whatever) then put the good image over that. Works! PoWa (203)
163080 2003-07-27 20:26:00 I image 30 plus pc all the time, image (power quest) file includes a second partion (OS xp pro, NTFS file system) but they are ALL EXACTLY the same hard ware specs, I think it may have something to do with the change in hardware ie Hard drive. XP and win 2000 can be very fussy about changing hardware then using a image file. 2000 has blue screened on me many times on bootup when using a image on a machine with slightly different specs than that on which it was created.

Have you tried doing a xp repair you will need to know the administrator password to achieve this.

Good Luck
beama (111)
163081 2003-07-27 21:44:00 If you are ghosting a duel boot system then yes you will have problems. When you ghost you are ghosting the drive that you installed XP onto. You are however NOT ghosting the first drive at the same time and it is that drive that contains the MBR and ntldr files needed to successfully boot into the OS.

While XP will display the splash screen it will not complete the loading. To successfully ghost and then restore the image you need to have Both hardrives in the machine and the first drive needs to still be the same, then restoring XP should work without a problem.

A similar thing occurs if you use two harddrives and format the windows98 drive while keeping the XP drive as is. Then when you reinstall you suddenly get the multiboot menu but if you were to choose XP it would fail to load.
Odin (227)
163082 2003-07-27 23:41:00 All care and no responsibility.
Do at you own risk.

www.experts-exchange.com
Merlin (503)
163083 2003-07-28 08:22:00 Thanks for all the help. I found a reference to the problem in an XP forum. Think it may be that the hard drive identifier is different and XP does have it. However, will try PoWa's suggestions.

Thanks again, Crunn
Crunn (1068)
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