Problem cloning OS using Norton Ghost

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Ronnie22

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Hi,
I recently upgraded my system from a P4 to a c2d e6300. However I just swapped the disk from the old system to the new and the OS gave me no problems booting up.
Now I need to shift the OS(and a whole lot of applications) from the old hard drive (5400rpm 40gb IDE drive) to a new bigger drive (Sata2 320 gb Seagate). However after using Norton Ghost to copy the hard drive onto the new, the new drive refuses to boot up

THe process that I have followed till now

1. Copy the OS from the old hard drive (10 GB primary partition; FAT32 4MB) onto the new drive (partition of 20 GB primary, active; NTFS)
2. Select the following options in Norton Ghost while copying
Set drive active (for booting OS)
Disable smart sector copying
Ignore bad sectors during copy
Copy MBR
3. After the copyin gis finished, I switch off the comp and remove the old harddrive
4. After switching on again I go to BIOS and set the new hard drive as the Boot drive.
5. I save/exit and watch the folowing error pop up
Replace drive or media
and then after i press enter it says
No boot drive or cd (or something to that effect)

Now my problem is I do not want to use the old installation cd of windows xp to boot up the new harddrive since I have a whole lot of applications loaded onto the old drive and definitely do not intend going through the entire rigmarole of loading up all those apps once again.

I might use Acronis True Image this weekend if Norton does not work .
But can anyone point out what it is I am doing wrong?
 
the boot sector partition, it seems to be the problem

Do u have WinXP CD? if so then do the following

Start Windows Setup, during the first or second stage of asking information, it'll ask if u want to enter the recovery console. Do so

at recovery console type :

bootsect c:

exit

should work....lemme kno the results here will ya
 
Something isn't clear here, you are trying to ghost from one sytem to a *different* one in terms of hardware.

I don't follow how this would work, since the underlying hardware is different ?

Ghosting from smaller drives to bigger drives should work fine for the *same* system.

When building a new system, isn't it necessary to rebuild everything from scratch.
 
^^ While it is necessary, the system would have atleast booted up, which it did not for some reason...
 
There is a very good free utility which suffices the needs and does it in a simple manner . i suggest using that . its called Driveimage XML to be used in conjunction with Bart's Preinstalled Envoirnment . you could aslo try Seagate's free utility which is by acronis which i found to be very nice as well .

As for the Fat to Ntfs problem , you could just convert the drive to ntfs and then make an image by using the convert command at the command line which will make the transitioning easier .

fairly on the whole seems like a complicated issue but you should be able to achive what you want to do in a couple of more tries with different tools .

Enjoy what you do . just dont get frustrated :)
 
Some thoughts on your clone process...

Make a FIRST partition on the 320GB smaller than 127GB and clone the old FAT32 HDD to this partition and the OS should run ...... BUT..... I found that when XP is "cloned" from drive "C" to a drive "D" then XP does a strange thing - on the new "D" partition it changes all references to its location as on a HDD which will be the "D" drive. So when you remove the "C" HDD and try boot from the new HDD you will be out of luck as XP will look for its files on a "D" HDD.

The way past this madness is to make a "backup image" instead of doing a clone and then "restore" the image to the new HDD - this seems to work for me with Ghost in the past and now Acronis.

@SharekhaN - the convert option of XP is a PITA as it maintains the allocation unit size of FAT32 which is 512 bytes as against the normal NTFS allocation unit of 4096 bytes - so this makes for the OS to read a lot more allocation units and puts a strain on the system and is supposed to slow it down.
 
If its a clone from something NON XP, how does XP know that its time to shift from C: to D: ??this seems strange
 
deepak said:
If its a clone from something NON XP, how does XP know that its time to shift from C: to D: ??this seems strange
Click to expand...

I have had this probem and I could not understand why system would not boot until I saw the boot.ini file which had references to XP being installed in the D HDD :( After that I looked at the system.ini and other ini files and all references were for the OS being on the D HDD :(

I did not try it but I now wonder if I had left that drive as D and made a dual boot setup on another HDD which was C and asked the OS to start working from D then would it have worked ??

When I made a backup image and restored it and all was fine :)
 
Eazy, I don't think the FAT size is 512 bytes for FAT32..more like it's 4K. Maybe you selected 512 bytes when you exercised the convert option?

I don't exactly recall, but I did something to format my NTFS partition with a 512 byte allocation size once. For a whole day, I was wondering why my system performance had gone down. i.e. 1 gig would take 5 mins to copy on my Raptor :O but 1 min on my samsung. Took me a while to figure this out.
 
512k is too low, use the default 4k for NTFS, its a better overall value.

And cluster size for FAT32, varies depending on the size of the parition, bigger it is the bigger it will be, so more wasteful than NTFS for similar sized patitions.
 
sydras said:
Eazy, I don't think the FAT size is 512 bytes for FAT32..more like it's 4K. Maybe you selected 512 bytes when you exercised the convert option?
Click to expand...

I got my info a while back and could not rememebr the why-for's of the 512 byte limitation for a convert from FAT32 to NTFS..... so I did a search for this info and got this hit....

If you use the Convert utility to convert a volume from FAT to NTFS, Windows always uses a 512-byte cluster size. FAT structures are aligned on 512-byte boundaries; a larger cluster size does not allow conversion.
Click to expand...

The Default Cluster Size for the NTFS and FAT File Systems

Please check this page and post here what do you think ?
 
Eazy said:
I got my info a while back and could not rememebr the why-for's of the 512 byte limitation for a convert from FAT32 to NTFS..... so I did a search for this info and got this hit....

The Default Cluster Size for the NTFS and FAT File Systems

Please check this page and post here what do you think ?
Click to expand...

Sorry for the terminology in my previous post. It should read "cluster size/allocation unit size" and not "FAT size".

The page compares NTFS to FAT16 cluster sizes and not FAT32 as you'd mentioned earlier.

I found a page mentioning the FAT32 cluster size as 4K.

Description of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP

I had a more elaborate link. Will post here if I find it.

I also don't remember how I decided to format my HDD with a 512 byte cluster size(not everyday that I format my HDD :) )
 
deepak said:
the boot sector partition, it seems to be the problem

Do u have WinXP CD? if so then do the following

Start Windows Setup, during the first or second stage of asking information, it'll ask if u want to enter the recovery console. Do so

at recovery console type :

bootsect c:
exit

should work....lemme kno the results here will ya
Click to expand...

My older system was a branded one and came with a win xp disk. However I do not want to install fresh.
I am unable to understand what will happen when I follow the instructions u have mentioned. How will this copy the OS and other applications from the old drive to the new?

Will consider giving it a try. However currently I am very finicky doing something drastic that will wipe out the only OS drive I have. Al the other 3 drives do not have an alternate OS.
 
sydras said:
Sorry for the terminology in my previous post. It should read "cluster size/allocation unit size" and not "FAT size".

The page compares NTFS to FAT16 cluster sizes and not FAT32 as you'd mentioned earlier.

I found a page mentioning the FAT32 cluster size as 4K.
Click to expand...

Check this page - it explains a lot about the convert procedure - shows how to get 4k cluster size whilst converting from FAT32 to NTFS - its at bottom of the page. Where did oformat come from never heard of this utility before :huh:

NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP
 
blr_p said:
Something isn't clear here, you are trying to ghost from one sytem to a *different* one in terms of hardware.

I don't follow how this would work, since the underlying hardware is different ?

Ghosting from smaller drives to bigger drives should work fine for the *same* system.

When building a new system, isn't it necessary to rebuild everything from scratch.
Click to expand...

The old drive is working on the new computer for the past couple of months and has had absolutely no problems booting up. I want to just change the hard drive now. The system is still the same.
 
SharekhaN said:
There is a very good free utility which suffices the needs and does it in a simple manner . i suggest using that . its called Driveimage XML to be used in conjunction with Bart's Preinstalled Envoirnment . you could aslo try Seagate's free utility which is by acronis which i found to be very nice as well .

As for the Fat to Ntfs problem , you could just convert the drive to ntfs and then make an image by using the convert command at the command line which will make the transitioning easier .

fairly on the whole seems like a complicated issue but you should be able to achive what you want to do in a couple of more tries with different tools .

Enjoy what you do . just dont get frustrated :)
Click to expand...

Yes, have heard about this utility provided by seagate. Will try that after running acronis True Image once.
I am not really sure if there is a FAT to NTFS problem.

Can you let me know if I transfer the old OS on a FAT32 (4096 cluster) to another drive which has been formatted as NTFS, will it create problems.

I did this the first time and it did not work so the next time, I formatted the new drive as FAT32 with 4mb cluster and it still did not work.

Incidentally there is an option in Norton ghost that asks if the file system in Source drive needs to be checked and also if the file system in destination drive needs to be checked. When I opted for one or both the copying process could not complete and Norton threw up an error saying that the file system is not compatible or something to that effect. Then I finally went ahead without ticking either of these options.
 
Ronnie22 said:
Yes, have heard about this utility provided by seagate. Will try that after running acronis True Image once.
I am not really sure if there is a FAT to NTFS problem.

Can you let me know if I transfer the old OS on a FAT32 (4096 cluster) to another drive which has been formatted as NTFS, will it create problems.

I did this the first time and it did not work so the next time, I formatted the new drive as FAT32 with 4mb cluster and it still did not work.

Incidentally there is an option in Norton ghost that asks if the file system in Source drive needs to be checked and also if the file system in destination drive needs to be checked. When I opted for one or both the copying process could not complete and Norton threw up an error saying that the file system is not compatible or something to that effect. Then I finally went ahead without ticking either of these options.
Click to expand...

The thing is when you make an image you take the drive image properties as well along with you . its like a bundled offer that you cannot opt out . the only way to transition from fat32 to ntfs would be manual file copy which does not work for us .

i still say the convert command is the best way for you to proceed and then move the image over .

try this , you should have sucess . :)
 
Eazy said:
Check this page - it explains a lot about the convert procedure - shows how to get 4k cluster size whilst converting from FAT32 to NTFS - its at bottom of the page. Where did oformat come from never heard of this utility before :huh:

NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP
Click to expand...

Thanks Eazy, that was a very informative article. Especially this piece

To prepare a hard drive for an optimal conversion from FAT32 to NTFS

1.
Create an MS-DOS startup disk on a machine running Windows XP.
2.
Add the following utilities to the startup disk:

• FDISK from Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me)
• OFORMAT and CVTAREA from Deploy.cab in the Support subdirectory of the Windows XP product CD.
3.
Boot MS-DOS.
4.
Run FDISK and create a single partition for the entire drive.
5.
Reboot MS-DOS.
6.
Run oformat c: /a:8 /v:"" /q
Note: Cluster size of the FAT32 volume should be 4 KB or larger at this point.
7.
Run cvtarea c:\cvtarea.tmp 500 MB /contig /firstcluster xx gb where
xx is the appropriate file size in relation to disk size, as listed in the following table.
8.
Start the regular OPK installation for Windows XP.
You may now copy operating system and application files to the FAT32 volume and perform your usual MS-DOS-based OPK process. After Windows XP has been installed, convert the volume to NTFS using the procedure in the next step.

9.
Run convert c: /fs:ntfs /cvtarea:cvtarea.tmp /nochkdsk
Note: Cluster size of the NTFS volume should now be 4 KB.
I have one question. If I am running WIn XP in drive C and convert it from the exisiting Fat32 (4096 cluster) to NTFS then will I have an problems? Will my OS still work?
 
SharekhaN said:
i still say the convert command is the best way for you to proceed and then move the image over .

try this , you should have sucess . :)
Click to expand...

Thanks SharekhaN,
The same question as above. If my OS is drive C and I am currently operating in winxp and decide to use the convert command for changing the file system from Fat32 to NTFS, will I have any problems with my OS? Will it still work fine and boot up?
 
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