Norton Ghost + SATA drive issues?

Question

Good day all, if anyone can offer any advice or suggestions that may help I would appreciate it immensely. Here's what I'm experiencing: I recently ordered a dimension 5150 with standard Windows XP Media Edition, and a SATA 250gb hdd. Out of the box the computer worked flawlessly, except that it did not come with a re-installation disk of any kind. I read through the Dell documentation included with the OS as to how to backup the OS should I ever need to repair or recover it, which indicated that Dell does not ship installation cd's and specifically recommended the use of Norton Ghost to make a full system backup. Fine.. I have a copy of Norton Systemworks 2003 and proceeded to install it and run Ghost, which took me through the initial steps of choosing what I wanted to do.. I chose to backup my system to a file. Then Norton informed me that it would need to reboot into it's own system in order to conduct the backup.. again, ok fine. From that point on my computer has never worked again. When my computer rebooted it proceeded into what seems to be a DOS shell of some kind but it simply hangs with a basic window framework and an hourglass cursor. I have no keyboard or mouse ability, and I have given this screen over an hour to do whatever it needs to do.. it is obviously stuck. Upon successive reboots Norton boots first and tells me that it's task did not complete and I am presented with the option to try again, or to simply boot back into windows... neither of these options do anything. My computer simply hangs forever. After much googling I encountered this thread: http://www.frontpagewebmaster.com/m-267353/tm.htm Unfortunately, I do not have an XP installation CD of any kind and therefore cannot boot into a recovery mode. Has anyone else encountered this situation? Is the fellow from that thread correct, Ghost and SATA drives are incompatable? Is my system toast, or can I recover this somehow (beyond buying a copy of XP, that is)? Thank you for any assistance.. tc

Hunni · Answer

Hi,

I have a Latitude Notebook with SATA Harddisk.

I also use every week Norton Ghost 2003 to Image my harddisk and this works without any problems.

I changed my virtual partition which ghost will create to "0", otherwise i will get the same problems.

The best is you call Dell Support and complain a little bit that you have no CD ... and ask for the Windos CD, normally (so it was in my case and also in other cases i read about) they will send you the Windows CD FOC.

best regards

Torsten

tcytra · Answer

Thank you for your reply Hunni,

I am in fact on the phone right now with Dell support and he is having me try various things to reboot the macine. The issue seems to be (by my understanding) that norton has written an entry to the master boot record and in doing so has corrupted it in some way so that nothing is able to read from the disk. It's terribly annoying, really..

tc

tcytra · Answer

Thought I would update the thread with my solution for anyone who encounters the same situation.

What happened is that Norton Ghost created itself a partition and tagged it as the only bootable partition available, but was then unable to follow through with it's procedure (seemingly due to the SATA drive, possibly because it is understood by the bios as a raid feature). When I understood this I realized all I needed to do was flag the proper partition to boot. I happened to have a Linux From Scratch livecd on my desk beside me and booted into it, ran fdisk, untoggled the fat16/win95 partition that norton flagged as bootable, retoggled my ntfs partition to be bootable, wrote the changes to the harddisk and rebooted my computer. Worked like a charm of course..

Any bootable media with any version of fdisk capable to toggling bootable partitions will help anyone resolve this issue.

Regards,
tc

ceri sheeran · Answer

Hi,   No details of computer model and Operating System which is always useful.     This may Help   Ghost 2003 creates a new partition and makes it the Active partition. It then boots off this active partition to run the PCDOS o/s and of course then run the Ghost utility.   You can get into an endless loop and not be able to get out of this. With Ghost continuously starting and rebooting back to the same new active partition.   Solution was simple and given to me on another forum.   Create a WIN 98 SE bootable floppy disk   http://www.bootdisk.com   Boot from the floppy disk   You may need to alter BIOS settings to do this.   At the A:> prompt   Type FDISK   Say Yes to the question re large disk support.   Now display F4 or option 4 your partition settings.   You will have a small new active partition ( around 8 MB ) as I recall   Your normal FAT32 or NTFS partition which is your C: drive is now not the active partition.   Solution is to delete the small newly created partition created by Ghost and make your C: drive ( either NTFS or FAT32 I hope you know what it is back into the Active Partition.   I would suggest you check things out first and post back with more information for more guidance.   I was facing a week of re-installing my O/S and all programs, then recovering data back from backups and images onto my C: drive.   Changing the Active partition back to my C: drive from whatever letter Ghost had made it. Took seconds. Reboot and upcame the Win XP start screen.   I made a donation to the particular forum to help keep it running.   hth   Ceri

tcytra · Answer

Ceri, you don't pay attention very well.

> "No details of computer model and Operating System which is always useful"

Well, yes I did in fact... look closely at my first post.

> "This may Help"

In my third post, the one right above yours, I outlined my solution which you then went on to (essentially) repeat. Thank you very much for trying to help, however I might encourage you to actually read the threads and posts before responding next time.

Cheers

Windows General

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