Any Norton Ghost gurus?

[slodave]

What a nightmare. Client has a Dell laptop. For he was trying to defrag the HD and it would report that chkdsk needed to run. Problem is, chkdsk would never run. There was no way to force it either.

Anyway, yesterday I used an XP pro cd to get to the recovery console and ran chkdsk from there. All seemed to go well - chkdsk did find problems and supposedly fixed them. Boy did it ever! Reboot computer and I get Error loading operating system. I finally get the HD onto a desktop, only to find out the main partition is no longer there!

I was able to ghost the laptop drive to a spare drive and from there, I was able to recover the missing partitions. Even though I could see directories, files... When I tried to boot to the drive, nothing. I tried the recovery console again and it said no HD was found.

I was ready to do a reinstall off of the store bought XP pro, but I noticed the the Dell recovery partition was intact and it had a spanned ghost image. I was successful in getting ghost to see the image and it installed, but only the first file (.GHO) the two (.GHS) files were ignored.

Anybody know how to get ghost to read all three files and do a proper reimage? If I can get the images loaded, the laptop would be "out of box" restored, which would be great for this client.

TIA! I am going to get out of my house for a little bit.

[Joeaksa]

Restore the hard drive and make a back up "clone" of the drive for him. I did that a while back and it so nice to have a clean backup copy of the master setup drive if needed.

I deleted any and all Norton programs off of my computers years ago. Simply take more memory and system resources than needed.

[rcecale]

Dave,

Could it be that the laptop is fairly new and has a SATA hard drive? If so, that could be why your XP is not seeing the hdd. Check the BIOS and see if you can disable the SATA feature and force the hdd to run as an IDE drive.

There was another thread here recently, about an HP laptop, and performing this step did the trick.

Randy

[slodave]

Joe if I could restore, I would. The partition table is so screwed, that I cannot boot to the Dell restore partition. I can get at the data (I.E. the ghost images), but that's it.

Randy, I have been using both a spare desktop with sata and the laptop (lt is about 2 years old). I read the thread, but this is not the issue. It was only after I ran a recovery program, that both machines stopped seeing the drive. I am beyond this anyway.

I really need to get ghost to see the Dell ghost image (consists of three 'spanned' images). The hacked version of ghost that Dell uses, is DOS based and since it writes to a FAT partition, it can only create 2 gig files - this is why I have a .gho file and two .ghs files.

Any more ideas or help? It's no longer a rush, but I'd like to get this done over the weekend.

Thanks!

[Joeaksa]

Dave,

Meant using the restore CD, just format the whole puppy or delete the partition and start over again with the Dell CD and take it back to stock.

[slodave]

Originally Posted by Joeaksa

Dave,

Meant using the restore CD, just format the whole puppy or delete the partition and start over again with the Dell CD and take it back to stock.

There is no Dell restore CD for this laptop. It came on a 4.5 gig partition. If things weren't this messed up, I could have used the 'ctrl-F11' and restored from the HD. I have access to the Dell ghost image (one image cut into three files), but first attempt only "ghosted" the first file. I thought it would at least prompt me to point to "file2", then "file3".

I have another copy of XP I can use, but I'd like to try and get this laptop to its OEM state.

Dave

[slodave]

Besides, if I had a restore CD/DVD, well, that'd just be too easy!

[slodave]

MacGyver's in tha house!

Tools needed:
1 thumbdrive
SW to make TD bootable
access to certain files from the Dell recovery partition
the three ghost image files
beer - lots
the Internet
a roll of duct tape
1 swiss army knife

This can be done! I know I am keeping everyone riveted to their seats, so I will check back with an update shortly

[slodave]

Getting there...

Duct tape and swiss army knife are useless though.

[slodave]

So close! Under Partition Manager, three partitions are shown, but I cannot get the second partition - the windows install to become the "C" drive.

Arghhh!

[slodave]

Seriously, you all can argue day in and day out about religion, politics, guns, but no one ever gets this deep in technology?

Wussies! Come on, walk on the razors edge - it's fun.

[slodave]

Whoo Hoooo!! Who's your daddy!!!!

I put the LT HD back into the LT and used the OEM Win XP disk and it let me get to the recovery console. I first tried 'fixboot', reboot and nothing. Next, I tried 'fixboot', then 'fixmbr'. I figured that the DELL MBR was not happy and really had nothing to lose. It worked! Windows overwrote the DELL MBR and Windows is now asking those all too familiar "lets get started" questions!.

I think I am going to try and make an image of this setup, so that if things go south in the future, I'll have a non-standard Dell image ready to go and working.

[Joeaksa]

Dave,

You are a sick, sick person! And I thought that I was the only one sick enough to waste this kind of time on projects!

Glad you got it going again.

Joe

[slodave]

I love this stuff. Things are so far gone and there really is not much help through Google. I love beating Microsoft, this case Dell and Microsoft and making things work when they say it can't be done.

I am now going to delete the two small Dell partitions, I needed create and merge the space into the main partition. Then the drivers and Windows updates need to be reinstalled.



Good stuff here:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm

[slodave]

Whoa ^^ looks like I'm starting to babble.

I'm done for the night. Most of the Windows updates are done. Turns out the laptop was running Media Edition. I'll finish the updates later today and burn an image to a couple of DVDs. After that, use the copy I made to get the contents of the old system to the new. Whew.

[slodave]

Originally Posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts

CHKDSK /r will fix the master boot sector. Run it from the recovery console. If the Dell partition is bad / missing, then I would suggest just running it from a CD...

Been there, done this many times...

-Wayne

Chkdsk /r will also destroy a damaged Dell partition table.
Read from the top.

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by slodave

I love this stuff. Things are so far gone and there really is not much help through Google. I love beating Microsoft, this case Dell and Microsoft and making things work when they say it can't be done.

I am now going to delete the two small Dell partitions, I needed create and merge the space into the main partition. Then the drivers and Windows updates need to be reinstalled.



Good stuff here:
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm

Dave,

Many, many people feel that there are things that cannot be done. Time to throw it away and buy new they say or are told at the big box stores. Sorry to tell them that there are people like us who just love to correct that concept. When I see a sticker that says "do not open, no user servicable parts inside" I head for the workshop and a screw stick.

Sorry but these things were designed, engineered and built by people and by God they can be fixed by people. Fiddling with computers and machines is ok but when a challenge pops up, thats whats fun for me. Do not tell me that something cannot be done because 90% of the time I will find a way to make it work.

Glad to see you got it up and working!

Joe

[rcecale]

Way to go, Dave! Gotta love that stick-to-it-tive-ness!!!

Have to agree with you and Joe on the way you guys like to tear into issues like this. Common fixes for routine issues are one thing, but being able to hang in there and think outside the box to get it done really says a lot about a person's character, IMHO.

Randy

[Mule]

Partition Magic may help as may ERD Commander. When this is over check out Acronis True Image. Nuck Forton!