Ghost Solution Suite

I have a dell laptop that I need to reimage. I continually get an internal error 28013. I have tried several usb boot which all work in other laptops. I have formatted the hard drive and installed windows 7 from scratch. I have run diagnostics and no errors come up. I am thinking about wiping the hard drive clean all together.

Here is the ghosterr.txt:

*********************************
Date   : Tue Jul 10 13:51:39 2012
Error Number: (28013)
Message: Unable to mount NTFS filesystem.
Version: 11.5.1.2266 (Dec 24 2009, Build=2266)
OS Version: DOS v7.10
Command line arguments: -fni
Active Switches :
       AutoName
PathName            : 241964 x86_microsoft-windows-comdlg32_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7601.17514_none_b7b87b8d03e9acb0_comdlg32.ptxml_e7a9d9f8
DumpFile            : 00000008.ghs
DumpPos             : 17886821732
FlagImplode         : 0
FlagExplode         : 3

Operation Details :
  Total size.........29818
  MB copied..........29326
  MB remaining.......492
  Percent complete...98%
  Speed..............664 MB/min
  Time elapsed.......44:08  
  Time remaining.....0:44  

Program Call Stack
AbortLog
Generic_Abort
performPostCopyNTFSPartitionOperations
performPostCopyDiskOperations
CopyFileToDisk
CopyMainline
AttemptOperation
sub_main
main

Call Stack
  0x0051099a
  0x000f001f
  0x000ef6bc
  0x000eea86
  0x000f085a
  0x00158412
  0x00030d98
  0x0012a767
  0x0012787c
  0x00002884
  0x00002b21
  0x00006b85
  0x0000549c
  0x0052e578

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you!

You have not indicated whether your USB boot is DOS or WinPE, but the error description points towards the boot environment being unable to mount the hard disk. This is to be expected if you are using DOS on a modern system with a SATA hard disk as DOS has no SATA support. If your bios offers an IDE (PATA) emulation for the hard disk you could try setting that, but the best way forward is to use WinPE and ensure the correct Vista 32 bit drivers are added to WinPE-V2 (which is based on the Vista kernel) so that your SATA devices can be accessed.

The log says DOS...

The thing is we image hundreds of these laptops using the DOS boot. All of these laptops have SATA drives. Its only this one laptop that wont take the image. It gets about 98% done and sends out the error. It was brought back to us because it would not boot up. As said before, I can load straight up windows, but we need to use our corp image.

This strikes me as having all the characteristics of a hardware fault. Either there is a problem on the hard disk or there is a memory fault caused by pattern sensitivity. These things do not always show up on diagnostics, especially hard disk diagnostics which default to read operations only to avoid trashing user data. If you have a diagnostic that can do a full pattern write on the hard disk (which would also perform the wipe you are considering) then this will give you a better indication of disk condition. If the hard disks are easy to swap, try writing this disk in a known good machine and then try the suspect machine with a known good hard disk.

Getting to 98%, which you did not mention originally, does change the complexion of the problem quite significantly, as the error "Unable to mount NTFS file system" appears to be a pretty catastrophic error which would be expected to prevent any imaging.

As a great believer in checking the basics - I assume the target partition is large enough to hold the data you are deploying, and you are not accidentally trying to image to the vendor's maintenance or recovery partition instead of the system partition.

Ya sorry forgot to mention it got mostly done. Definately correct part. I have used the recovery part by accident several times while in a rush. It only gets 2% done before you get an error . I think I might have a spare hard drive. Dell is a pain for replacing the parts when their diagnostics wont catch a problem. But if it loads with another hard drive, then it has to be the part!

I will let you know!

Thanks again!

Put a new hard drive in it... ghosted fine! I just couldnt get past all the hard drive test I had run passed just fine!

Thanks Again!

That's the problem with non-destructive disk diagnostics, as they do not write to areas where there is existing data, to avoid data loss.

Yet you need a test that will write and read back from all areas of the disk to be able to evaluate whether there are problems in specific areas of the disk surfaces.

Still, you got there in the end....