[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.