ghost and NTFS partitions

[Posted and mailed]

On 22 Jun, Derek MacKeddie wrote:

The message
from Carl Sellars contains these words:

snip
I've found that Ghost 2003 works great with NTFS partitions with one
exception. You can't recover a bootable drive C: image without a lot of
messing about. Perhaps someone has solved this more elegantly than I
have, if
so I'd like to know how you did it.

Carl,
I've never had any problems doing this with both XP or Win2k.
I don't know why you should have problems, have you got Ghost set to
'image all' ?
I think that's the default setting, I use it set at that.

Here's a copy of the Ghost.ini I use on my boot disk:


[snip]

Hi Derek,

Thanks for your reply. I've checked my boot disc and actually I can't find a
Ghost.ini file on it anywere. :-( But your comments have been some help.

After looking through the info you supplied I suspect that I need to explore
these switches:

defaultImg(Default) = Y
ia(Image All) = N
ib(Image Boot) = N
id(Image Disk) = N

At the moment I'm doing all of the config from within the Windows interface
and then leting it sort everything out for me from there. As a result I'm
not messing with the switches because I didn't expect the defaults to be
anything other than "backup everything". It looks like I may have missed the
solution I'm seeking by not doing this and so I think I need to explore these
further.

Of course the manual doesn't detail the function of the switches, but it does
point me at more docs on the installation CD. Looks like I need to go look
there. If I find a solution I'll post back to this thread,

Many thanks,

--
Carl

"Some days you're the pigeon, some days you're the statue....."
-- Anon

I've found that Ghost 2003 works great with NTFS partitions with one
exception. You can't recover a bootable drive C: image without a lot
of messing about. Perhaps someone has solved this more elegantly than
I have, if so I'd like to know how you did it.

Here's the issue for me:

I upgraded the disc which held my bootable NTFS drive C under W2K. I
firstly Ghosted the image, replaced the drive and restored the image
to the new drive. Following this the machine wouldn't boot. I've
experienced this before under W98 and so began the search in the
documentation for the W2K equivilant of the sys.com process which
resolves this. Regretably I (still) haven't found how to do this.

The only way I've been able to make the drive bootable again was to
reinstall W2K to the point where it gives me a bootable disc and then
restore the Ghost image over the top.

As far as I can tell this problem will impact anyone who either
replaces a bootable NTFS disc with a new one or who reformats the old
disc for whatever reason prior to recovering from a Ghost 2003 image.

Details of any better, alternate solution(s) to this little problem
would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds as though you have backed up only the C: drive partition and not
the boot sector of the drive. You need to ensure that you backup the whole
drive. If you restore the drive without the MBR, then it won't boot. You
could run the recovery console and run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT, which should sort
it out, but if you backup all of the drive, this is not required.

--

Graham Mayor