Grrr... help with Ghost, please!

[Jeffbx]

OK, I went to upgrade one of my computers yesterday - I want to replace the 40GB IDE drive with an 80GB SATA drive. I install Ghost (v9.0), run the 'hard drive copy', and everything looks good. All the files copy over with no problems.

However, when I go to boot from the new drive, here's the error message I get:


Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

I tried running a couple of tools to rewrite the MBR (fixmbr & ghreboot, I think?), but made no difference.

The drive is properly set as the boot disk, I made sure that Ghost set the drive as an active partition, the drive itself is OK; I can see all of the ghosted data when I boot from the original drive... what am I missing?

[gwilks98]

Does ghost support SATA? I remember having problems imaging with Imagecast when ATA100 first came out.

[DarkFury]

I dunno... I've only got the Older Norton Ghost 2003.

Looking through the Norton Knowledgebase, maybe this will help:
http://search.symantec.com/custom/us/techsupp/kb/query.html?csm=no&lk=1&rf=0&nh=7&la=en&tpre=us&tdir=&src=sg&prod=Norton+Ghost&pcode=ghost&ver=9.0&miniver=ghost_9&qt=SATA+&boolean=and&qp=all&search.x=43&search.y=13

[Hoser]

I have Norton SystemWorks 2003 and I used Ghost to do the same thing you're trying to do and it worked. The computer was a Dell 400SC with an Intel 875 chipset.

[Jeffbx]

Well crap, that's the same setup I have.... WTF am I doing wrong? I tried it again tonight - removed the partition on the new drive in case that was the problem, but no dice - same dang error.

[gwilks98]

Does WinXP have a feature that can be toggled so that the install only works with one system? (In other words, it does a device check to make sure no one cloned your drive when you weren't looking.)

I had a problem a while back where I took a WinXP install and moved it to a different laptop to recover some data and it wouldn't boot at all on the other machine.


I'm lost Jeff. Maybe try a new cable?

[Markel]

I realize that it's probably obvious, but have you visited your BIOS to see if you need to change a setting to boot from SATA rather than IDE? (My BIOS has a Onchip SATA BOOTROM enable/disable setting.)

[Jeffbx]

Yup, I double checked that... I'm glad the 400SC has the handy F12 boot menu option so I can just pick the SATA from the list. However, just to be thorough I usually pull the cable from the old drive so there will be no confusion as to which is the primary drive.

Bit of new info - there are some error messages being generated in the Ghost log:


Description: Unable to successfully reconcile changes since last session. Unable to enumerate the current drives on this system.
Cannot initialize the Storage Management Engine.
Details: Unspecified error

and


Unable to rescan disks.
Unable to successfully reconcile changes since last session.
Unable to enumerate the current drives on this system.
Cannot initialize the Storage Management Engine.
Unspecified error

I can't find any info on either message at the Symantec help page, so I think maybe my next step is to just remove & re-install Ghost & see if those errors go away.

[rajatQ2]

Ghost works fine on SATA drives. I've been using ghost since V7.5 (corporate) on SATA drives.

Jeff, another possibility, have you ever used the MS Sysprep utility? Sometimes, when copying between XP/2003 machines, the hardware profiles really get in the way. Sysprep removes the unique system identifiers, so when you pop windows back open, windows will generate new identifiers. One problem with this, though, is what kind of license do you have? We do this with a volume license all the time - because we reuse the same key.
Sysprep is powerful and useful.

Symantec's link:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/2000081610075225?Open&src=&docid=20011204171729931&nsf=SUPPORT%5CINTER%5Cent-securitysimplifiedchinesekb.nsf&view=cn_docid&dtype=&prod=&ver=&osv=&osv_lvl=



Windows XP: If creating an image of a Windows XP installation, use the Windows XP version of Sysprep (found on the Windows XP CD), rather than the Windows 2000 version. There are two versions of Sysprep for Windows XP:

* Windows XP without Service Pack 1 installed: Version 5.1.2600 on Windows XP installation CD.
* Windows XP with Service Pack 1: Version 5.1.2600.1106.

[Jeffbx]

Good thought - I can give that a try, but I think the issue is with the MBR or the FAT, since the disk doesn't even start to boot. It's a Windows generated error, but it never gets to the point where Windows begins loading.

I uninstalled last night but didn't get a chance to re-install it. Maybe I'll re-apply SP1 before I reload it & see if that makes a difference.

[rajatQ2]

Oh, i started getting ahead of myself.

Have you tried the WinXP Recovery console? boot from your XP CDrom. Here is a link to the WinXP Recovery console commands. They have utils to repair / rewrite your MBR, if that is the problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q314058

[Kevster]

Jeffbx, Did you resolve your problem? I'm really interested in your solution since I have to do this exact same thing soon.

[Jeffbx]

Well, still trying to find time to go back & try some more things.

I tried the recovery console as rajatQ2 suggested - I ran FIXBOOT & FIXMBR, but they didn't seem to make any difference... same error as before. Just for kicks, I threw a basic XP image on the new drive to make sure it would boot OK - that worked fine, so I'm pretty sure the problem doesn't lie with the drive.

I've uninstalled Ghost on my home machine, so I'm going to try to re-install it & give it another go this weekend.

[tlianza]

Well, still trying to find time to go back & try some more things.

I tried the recovery console as rajatQ2 suggested - I ran FIXBOOT & FIXMBR, but they didn't seem to make any difference... same error as before. Just for kicks, I threw a basic XP image on the new drive to make sure it would boot OK - that worked fine, so I'm pretty sure the problem doesn't lie with the drive.

I've uninstalled Ghost on my home machine, so I'm going to try to re-install it & give it another go this weekend.

Did you ever figure this out? I have the same problem, and apparently this thread is the only one Google turns up that describes anyone else having this issue. I'm just trying to back up an IDE drive (though I have SATA drives on my machine) to a [Linux/Samba] network share.

Thanks,
Tom

[ribitch]

try rebuilding the boot config file. believe the command is bootcfg /rebuild

i had a similar problem the other day, and it was caused by that. Personally i think the new ghost sucks. Symantec is using the v2i engine that they aquired when they bought powerquest. The old ghost is much much nicer

[Jeffbx]

Wow, back from the grave!

I never did solve this problem, but did discover it's a compatibility issue with Ghost v9 and SATA drives. I apologize that I don't recall where I saw this posted, but if you go back a version, it seems to work fine.

I have no idea if Symantec ever fixed this issue or not - I finally ended up just doing a manual rebuild on the stupid thing.

[Markel]

Wow, back from the grave!
No grave is safe with Google around. :heh:

[eSDee]

I had a similiar problem recently by using the Hard Drive Copy setting in Ghost 9.0. What I ended up doing was backing up the drive to an external drive, and then restoring it to the new drive I was upgrading it to. Worked perfectly.

[Kevster]

I had a similiar problem recently by using the Hard Drive Copy setting in Ghost 9.0. What I ended up doing was backing up the drive to an external drive, and then restoring it to the new drive I was upgrading it to. Worked perfectly.

I had the same issue. I also did what eSDeeLoco did and that worked for me as well. In my case I was trying to backup a RAID 0 array that was having disk error problems.

[eSDee]

Great minds think alike.

[Keefer]

Hello all. I thought I would chime in on this issue, in case anyone was still interested in what might have happened with Ghost to make it do what it was doing to Jeffbx all those months ago.

I started getting the following error message tonight, after having exchanged a 120GB drive for a 160GB one. (For the record, I have two SATA drives in this computer, but the one I replaced was a regular PATA drive, and it was replaced with another PATA drive.)


Unable to rescan disks.
Unable to successfully reconcile changes since last session.
Unable to enumerate the current drives on this system.
Cannot initialize the Storage Management Engine.
Unspecified error

Ghost started flashing that error message and pretty much stopped doing anything productive when I would start it. No jobs would run, etc.

The solution for my case was to go into Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management. A "ghost" drive with no letter assigned and an "X" icon through it still existed in the list of drives currently active on the system. It had the size of the drive I had removed, so it no longer physically existed in the system, though XP still apparently expected to find it. I right-clicked on it and selected Remove Drive, and it disappeared. At that point, I went back into Ghost, and the error message went away, and everything appears to be working again.

I hope this at least sheds some light on why this happened and, possibly (thank you, Google), helps anyone else who might run into this. I still can't believe Symantec has never posted anything on it.

Thanks for your time,
Keith

[Jeffbx]

Wow, thanks for the update (and welsome to the forums!). I also can't believe there's still nothing posted by Symantec on this issue yet.

Well, due to the magic of Google, I guess we'll just talk about it here! Let's have a little more help - has anyone else ever done (or tried) the following, successfully or unsuccessfully:

Using Ghost 9.0, replicate an image from a PATA primary (boot) drive onto a SATA drive.

If you did, speak up & share your experience.