Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

I am using Ghost 8 to clone a drive.  I was able to make an image of the drive but when I clone it to another drive and put it in its original machine, it still shows the old data on the drive (Including the partition table).  If I put it back into the machine I cloned it on, it shows the new data perfectly imaged

The Laptop is a new Dell XPS 15 (L521x) which uses iSRT 

The Hard Drive is a 500 GB Western Digital Black Scorpio 7200 RPM

I am completely mind blown as to why something like this would happen, any assistance would be great.  If you need more info of course I would be happy to provide.

Thanks!

~Rick

Are these SATA drives?

Are you using Ghost 8 with DOS (which has no SATA support)?

They are SATA drives, and I have used it plenty of times with SATA drives.  I am cloning in a windows environment

I would guess that the two machines are addressing the drives using different geometries - one may have the bios set to IDE emulation which is one solution to SATA support for DOS boots, and the other bios may use a different addressing scheme.

So if for the sake of argument, one system is addressing the drive using logical block addressing, and the other system is using cylinder/head/sector addressing, it is possible that the old partition table written by one system is not getting overwritten by the imaging on the other system as the drive is being written using two different geometries.

A 500Mb drive has a logical block count that exceeds the block count that DOS can address using a 32 bit address block, which can further complicate issues. The original release of XP also suffered an inability to address a drive partition greater than 132Gb due to the 32 bit issue, and I recall that Promise released a 48 bit firmware update for their IDE controllers to get around this when SP1 was released with 48 bit support.

Sorry to go on, but despite some clever programming in Ghost to get around many of the limitations in DOS, the reason that the latest release of Ghost includes WinPE is that WinPE does not have these limitations and is also aware of the existence of EFI bioses.

Hey, that kind of makes sense.  Except that I was cloining on my vista machine and the 500gb (destination) was plugged into USB.  Not sure if USB emulfation is restricted in that way, but other SATA drives (large and small) have cloned perfectly fine  using this method so I am not sure why this instance is so unique

~Rick

I suspect it depends on the design of the USB to SATA adapter you are using.

Generally, I have found that if I make an image to an external drive, it is better to restore that image from the external drive to a replacement drive connected to the same interface as the original drive. This ensures that the same hardware recreates the image as created it in the first place.  OK, it means two separate imaging operations, but this can be a lot quicker than trying to sort out the issues you are experiencing when things go amiss.

Another thing worth checking is that your Vista machine has the latest USB drivers installed.