Ghost Solution Suite

I work with a school that has a Windows Vista 32-bit computer with a failing hard disk.  I repaired the disk and the computer is now stable, but wish to clone the disk to a new disk to avoid future problems.  I've done this kind of thing many times before with Ghost Solution Suite.  On this disk, the clone begins and first does the $Log file, then the current file display stays forever on "19 Unnamed MFT entry".  The clone proceeds to 100%, then exceeds 100% and keeps on going.  The time and bytes remaining become negative values.  The size of the clone exceeds the original disk size and will keep going until it fills the destination disk (no matter how large), then it will fail with a disk full error.  I also tried "partition to image" rather than "disk to disk", same result.

If I check the destination disk after cloning fails, it appears to have the file/directory structure but NTFS is heavily damaged.

I'm guessing there is a bad entry in the MFT of the source disk, even though the computer boots and runs normally.  I've run chksk /f and /r many times, the disk now passes with no reported problems (although at first it had many).  I've run "contig c:\$Mft" and also used the $MFT optimization features in UltraDefrag.  No change.

Currently the source disk shows no problems except SMART unhealthy status, due to the numerous errors before repair.  I've tried using the Ghost agent in both VSS and PreOS modes.  Also tried the Ghost Boot CD locally on the machine.  Result is the same in all cases.  Never seen this behavior before, usually Ghost runs without problems.  This disk has proprietary vendor software & settings so we'd like to avoid re-installing WIndows if possible (expensive vendor service call required).

Any suggestions for how to overcome this?  Could it be a partiiton table issue rather than MFT?

Have you run CHKDSK or SCANDISK from a WinPE boot?  Don't try to image modern hardware, especially SATA drives, under DOS - always use WinPE as DOS does not support SATA (unless your bios offers a compatibility mode and AHCI is switched off). DOS also has issues with large disks as it is limited to CHS addressing and modern disks need LBA.

If you are able to get a clean run with disk checking under WinPE, try running Ghost under WinPE as well.

Depending on whether your system is a Lenovo (for example), you may need to use the /B switch in order to capture their boot manager blocks.  There are other switches that may be helpful - if you can't find them online in the Connect environment, I can look them up and post the links when at my home computer.

Whatever the outcome, it is clearly a good idea to make a backup image of your expensive to set up system in case it fails again, or perhaps add a second identical disk and run them mirrored.

Yes, the machine had been failing for awhile but had no luck getting on-site staff to address it.  I was there for other stuff so I took a shot.  It works again but I wanted to get a Ghost image backup, and also replace the disk.  It has scheduled Ghost backups but they had obviously been failing too. The machine is the telephone system manager, so there is reluctance of the staff to touch it.

The Ghost Solution Suite PreOS envrioment is based on WinPE, I'm not sure what version but possibly v3.   It has made many images of identical machines in the school, we use it regularly.  It has imaged this machine before too (just not recently).  Only thing different this time was the disk having crashed.  It must have sustained a problem that Ghost can't deal with, I just can't locate it and was hoping someone would recognize the behavior and have a solution.

Because ghost is chewing on the bad sectors it is messing up you data counter.   IF this is a known failing drive then let ghost run until it is finished.    It will continure over and over to get data from the bad sectors but is likely to eventually finish if given enough time.

   I had a failed drive once take more than a week to get an image of.    Windows was messed when I restored the image but I got a ton of data off the restored image.    

Check out the following with switches you could run to aid your image create of this failing drive. 

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH106622

Thanks for the advice.  I since learned that this drive may have exceeded the entry limit for bad sectors in the G-list tables.  Scandisk will recover it but Windows still reports bad sectors at every access of the hard disk, even though It's been working well.  I used a disk optimizer to move the data to other parts of the disk for now.

When I let Ghost run indefinitely before, it filled the destination drive, so it wasn't just trying to recover bad sectors, it was writing non-existent sectors to the image.  I'm sure it's confused by the errors on the disk.  I may try another imaging product that is meant for dodgy drives.  Thanks again.