Disk does not boot laptop after cloning

What is the make and model of the PC you are imaging? Is it the same as the computer you are putting the hard drive into? In other words are you taking an image off of one machine and putting onto a HD that is going to be placed in a different model machine?

The make and model is IBM T61 laptop.     I am cloning the drive in the laptop to a larger drive that I will then install in the same laptop.     THe current drive will then be rebuilt.     I am trying to get the user more disk space.

So that laptop is using a SATA drive? When you say it won't boot what are you getting? Blue screen, no screen? If it's a blue screen what's the error 0x7b? What type of cloning are you using?

The drive I am cloning to is a SATA drive.    When the cloned drive is installed in the laptop and the system starts up I get a blank screen with a cursor in the top lefthand side of the screen.

I'm using Symantec Ghost 8.3.0.1331.   I've created images with systems successfully in the past.    This is the first time I tried to clone a drive mostly because of the time factor.    The user has 152GB of data and an image will take approximately 30 hrs while cloning takes only 4 hours.

Because of IBM propriatary behavior you will need to do 2 things you will need to use a switch with Ghost the switch is -IB and this gathers the entire boot sector rather than the industry standard first track. 

The second thing you will probably have to do is to create an image and then put the new drive in the laptop and restore the image.  Because IBM's have a history of dealing with the hard drives in a propriatoary way the drive recieving the image will have to be written to using the laptops hard drive controller instead of being plugged into a usb adapter.  ( I love the useb addapters and use them all the time but this often fails on an IBM) 

If it were mine I would just do the disk to disk again makeing sure to include the -ib switch.

Here is an article that explains why this happens.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-57590

cheers

Does BIOS recognize the larger drive? If you boot from the Windows XP cd are you adding the SATA drivers at the beginning to enable the cd to see the SATA drive? If you're cloning to a larger drive in Windows XP you might want to sysprep the old drive first..

I'll try it again using the -IB switch when the user is back in the office.     I did not add the SATA drivers when booting from the XP CD.

Thank you!

I have seen this type of behavior myself on a PC.  If the above fails try installing the new larger target drive to the internal SATA connector as you ultimately intend to do.  Now, connect the smaller source drive to the external USB port and try to image it that way. 

The only reason I came up with for this working for me in the past was that the drive geometry was not the same as seen from the USB bus VS the interal bus.  Could be wrong but it worked for me.

I tried to use the -IB switch but the second drive (connected via a USB device) was not recognized.       Of course if I remove the -IB it finds it but I will run into the same problem where the disk will not boot.     Since the user is out of the office today, tomorrow I'll try inserting the new (destination) drive in the laptop and attach the current (Original) drive via the USB device.     I'll let you know if this works.

David,  did you need to use any switches in the ghost command for this to work?

Thank you!

cschiavo,

No switches were necessary.  Hopefully it works for you.

David's suggestion is good,  with an IBM I have seen that the -IB must be used and that the drive being read must be installed connected to the IBM's internal controller and that the destination drive must be connected to the IBM's internal drive controller.

   So to do this you will have to create a ghost image of the little drive then install the big drive and restore from the ghost image to the big drive.   Obviousely there are a lot of different models of hardware with a lot of differrent configureations so this may not be the only way to do this but it has given me the highest level of success with the lenovo's that I have had to work on.

Cheers.

I tried David's suggestion last night and it worked!        Not sure why each time I tried to use the -ib switch Ghost didn't see the drive hanging off the USB device.

Thank you!

After cloning Fedora Core 8, I get an invalid partition table error. I've tried reinstalling the GRUB via the live CD and still I get the "Invalid Partition Table" error. Can someone help me out? I know FC9 is not supported. What about Ubuntu 8.10?

I do not know if I am imaging incorrectly but any direction would be appreciated.

Thanks,