Ghost Solution Suite

Dell XPS M1530, Vista 64 bit OS.

I just spent 5.5 hrs making an image of my 275 gb laptop hard drive (189 gb used space) onto a 500 gb laptop drive via a USB connection.

At the end of the cycle, Norton Ghost told me my "copy" was successful.

When I replaced the original drive with the new imaged drive in the laptop it had trouble booting. I then took the imaged drive out and viewed it as an external drive to see what was there.  The imaged drive shows only 145 gb transferred. 

What did I miss? 

Here is the process I used:

Copy one Hard Disk to Another hard disk

Check sourcd for file errors - checked

check destination for file errors - checked

set drive active for booting OS - checked

disable smart sector - checked

ignore bad sectors - NOT CHECKED

copy MBR - checked

I did NOT reboot with both the original and copied drives connected.

So what did I do wrong and how do I get the complete drive to image onto the larger hard drive?

Any help would be appreciated.

This forum is for Ghost solution suite.

Please submit your query regarding Norton Ghost 14 to this forum.

Thanks,

Govardhan

In my experience, just making an image of a hard disk running an operating system onto another hard disk, and then expecting the new hard disk to run when substituted for the original hard disk, seldom results in a working system.

The sequence that works in most situations is to boot the system containing your source drive to WinPE or another operating system that runs from CD or USB stick, then make an image of your original hard disk to a backup device. You need to make sure that you capture any hidden partitions or maintenance partitions as well, as the original disk may be using some sort of boot manager and if you don't make a faithful copy of all partitions then the structure on the new disk may be incompatible with the boot process expected by your operating system.

Once imaging is complete, shut down the system, change the hard disk to the larger one, and then boot back to your external operating system and restore the imaged partitions to your new drive. Doing it this way ensures that any sector translation scheme used by the local hard disk controller is laying down the data in a recogniseable way. Once reimaging is complete, reboot the system and it should now work. If not, just check that the correct partition is marked as active.

1st - sorry for wrong forum.  I found the new Norton site to be a bit confusing. I'll post to the other forum to see if there are any other easier suggestions. In the meantime please don't delete this post as I will need to refer to it again in the next couple of days.

2nd - EdT  Thanks for this info. I thought that Norton Ghost was supposed to be an easy way to make good images but it seems I was wrong.What you write makes a lot of sense and I intend to do it that way.  I just went out and bought a 4 gb flash drive that will be dedicated to install WinPE on, but I am also still interested to see others have to say so I will also pose this question to the other forum.

Godarvhan,

I just went to your link but all the software options I had to choose from made me feel like I was in another world.

I am using Ghost 14 - not some enterprise suite, so I got lost.

In any case, I think I'll do exactly what EdT suggested.

Adventures with WinPE Symantec Connect

This will get you up and running with a WinPE environment. I've run Ghost V8.x from the WinPE command prompt to image drives and that works well. Or you can check out imagex.exe and diskpart.exe which are part of winpe.

EdT

One question on the 2nd para of your first reply to me.

Once I have succesfully created a "perfect" image on the larger hard drive wich will be external at the time of imaging, why can't I just put that drive into the laptop then boot from it and use it in a normal manner?

Each new release of operating system from Microsoft brings new imaging challenges - for example Win 7 creates two partitions when installed, and both are necessary for Win 7 to boot.

In addition to that, and depending on which manufacturer created the original image for your machine, there may we a boot manager which handles options such as system recovery, and the boot manager itself may be linux based, which for example Norton Ghost 15 just does not understand (This was a Lenovo Vista system I was trying to image).

Hard disks are also initialised with various information such as their device number. In addition, there are differences in the way that IDE drives are handled by different controllers when it comes to logical block addressing, so an external USB controller hooked up to a hard disk may use a different sector addressing scheme to the controller inside your laptop.

Finally, there can only be one active partition in any computer system, so imaging an active partition to another hard disk will not result in the second partition being active.

So for a number of reasons, a two step approach usually gives the most reliable results.

Cloning my lenovo proved impossible with any Ghost product and I ended up using Acronis disk manager booting from CD, making a full image of the hard disk. This product is very slow and took over 24 hours to create the image, but the restore to the new hard disk was faster and worked, including the Linux boot manager.

EdT,

Thanks again for your complete and articulate reply.  I understand pretty much everything you explained.

I am perplexed about one thing though:

I bought Norton Ghost 14 because it said it would clone my Vista 64 bit drive. I have to believe that 1,000's or 10's of thousands bought it for the same reason. Why am I not seeing a complete revolt online from people who, like me, bought this software and find it did not work as expected/advertised?

Loren Lewis