Replace Drive in Multiboot System

I have a system with 2 physical drives that boots W98 and two W2ks (C,D,G). I thought the C drive was the primary boot drive. I have W98 there with the boot.ini file. I had installed the W2ks after installing W98. My second (30 gig MAXTOR) physical drive (D, I, J) is giving me SMART messages for imminent failure. I got a MAXTOR 60g drive to replace this with. I partitioned the new drive with the utility provided, telling the utility the drive was not a boot drive. After I ghosted-back the D Drive and tried to reboot, I got a message saying "Invalid Boot Drive" and the system would not boot. So I re-installed my imminently-to-fail drive, everything still works as before.

I had told the system D was not a boot drive because it was my (probably erroneous) impression that it did not matter and since (I thought) C was the boot drive I did not want the CMOS to think differently to where I couldn't fix things back.

Am I going to have to reinstall one or more OSs from scratch to replace this physical drive? How worried should I be about SMART messages? I got these messages about 3 months ago and bought the drive, then they mysteriously stopped. I am running the drive maintenance tools. Does my partition have to be EXACTLY the same size to make the ghost restore work right? Why shouldn't GHOST work fine on different physical drives? Will backing up without compression make any difference? The D drives with both new and old drives are about 10 gig. The size may not be PRECISELY
the same.

Or, should I rerun the config utility, telling the system that D is a (the?) boot drive, even then install W98 or W2k on it, before ghosting back my existing W2k?

Thanks,

Tom

 

Hi Tom,

That's a very interesting question. Please describe how you "ghosted-back the D Drive ", image a partition? image a disk? or clone a drive? Since this is really about ghosting I'll try to see if the moderator can expand the title of your query. Hopefully that will attract the ghost 'gurus' here.

 

Sparrow,
Thanks for replying! I have always used the Image-a-partition option in Ghost. I am using Ghost 2001. My procedure is to make an image of the partition and store the result in a partition of the other physical drive. This I learned by reading the guides at Radified.com, which I recommend. IAW that site's recommendations, I always execute the image check.

It was just recommended to me on the phone that (1) I make an image of my entire drive to be replaced, (2) put the new hard drive back in, (3) tell the config utility to remove the partitions and format (he thinks but is not sure this step is necessary), (4) restore the ghost drive image to the new drive. This person said it will ask me if I want to add the additional (30gb) space to my last partition, which I of course would wish to do.

I am not going to try this, for now, pending remarks from the BBS-experts.

I am learning what the difference is between imaging a disk and cloning a drive. Apparently cloning means you never make an image but just hook both old and replacement drives up and tell ghost to copy one to the other. I found this warning in another thread:

"Anyway, Ghost 2003 can do a Disk to Disk clone. That procedure will clone all data from one to the other.

"Ghost will maintain the ratio of the partition sizes but gives You the option to resize any partition which is probably what You want if You go from a 10 GB HDD to a 120 GB HDD. Make sure that You choose the correct sizes for the partitions. The added sizes can not be higher than the total HDD size and if lower, You will end up with unallocated space.

"Connect the new HDD as Primary Slave for the cloning operation but it is very important to NOT LET GHOST RESET THE COMPUTER when finished. That would mix up the volume identifiers for Windows. Two HDDs with the same identifiers would be on the system and Windows would change them on the cloned HDD, from which Windows currently doesn't boot, rendering it non-bootable.

"So, when Ghost prompts for a reboot, shut the computer off on the power switch, remove the old HDD and connect the new HDD as Primary Master. Restart the computer and check that everything is OK. "

It appears the operative term for me here is "Ghost 2003" since I only have Ghost 2001. But I have enough free space to store a disk image, particularly since except for the primary partition I have largely migrated out the contents. And I would think that with a drive image restore I will not have to worry about the reset problem.

Thanks,

Tom

 

Success.

The disk-to-disk clone worked fine. Since they were different sizes, I had no problem being assured I selected correctly (didn't get Disk1 and Disk2 mixed up). The only checklist item omitted from our discussion was that when I substituted the new disk for Disk1, prior to cloning Disk2, I had to set the jumper to master (then reset to slave when installing as Disk2).

I am continuing to use Ghost 2001 even though I have a free copy somewhere of 2002. 2001 does not require the input of any code numbers each time to unlock it.

Thanks, guys!

Tom