Ghost image on new HD won't boot

Ghost image on a new WD 200G IDE drive won’t boot. I tried an existing and proven ghost image on this drive, but it wouldn’t boot after completion. I then installed it as a slave and could see all the windows files, so I scanned the disk for errors, reformatted and tried again with different proven Ghost image, again, no boot. I then formatted and installed a fresh copy XP Pro and it works normally. I created a Ghost of that on the second partition, formatted the primary partition and re-ghost, it still won’t boot!!! I then ghosted another drive (WD 80G) with that same image and it works fine.
I’ve used Ghost dozens of times on many different drives without anything like this before. Yes, jumpers are correct.

Single user home PC
Win XP Pro SP1
Ghost 2003 from a floppy
Primarly partition 10G, remainder on second partition. I always use an exiting XP OS, or the XP install disc to format.

 

hello,

I don't pretend to offer you a solution , just wish to mention a few issues:
- with Windows 9x there is no problem to restore a system from a Ghost image
to any primary DOS partition you may have on your 1st HDisk . With WinXP/2000
things are different
- the partition you try to restore must be the exact size of the partition you
cloned with N Ghost.
- must be also in the same position on the same HDisk, as for example the 2nd partition on the Disk1.
- if you made a ghost image of XP on a computer with dual boot WinXP and Win98 and wish to restore only the WinXP on another HD, then you have some problems...
- last but not least, after you recover a ghost image to a new hdisk (say the
target partition has the same size as the original one and takes the same position and your WinXP is not from a dual boot) you still need to check with
Partition Magic if the target partition is active and not hidden.
See also
this
page

good luck

Stefan

 

I also won't pretend to have an answer, but I 'll add a couple of things to what Stefan has suggested. Make sure there is only one HD installed at the time of the ghost. Try an unpartitioned drive to ghost to.

 

This contradicts my experience with ghosting as the partiton will be re-sized if necessary by ghost. 2003 version referenced.

 

Also, a Ghost image copied back to an unpartitioned drive will reinstate the partition from the image as well.

 

hello,

Thank you Paul and Rockster2U for this informaton. I had indeed some bitter experiences with Ghost 6.0 when trying to restore an image to a bigger partition
and since I prefered to keep record of the partition size.