HELP with cloning

[davidclayton]

got a copy of norton ghost 2003 off a mate,
trying to clone win xp [+programs, etc] from 80gig to 160gig HDD.

norton installs grand, and appears to work,
but when it goes into "pc dos" after the restart,
it just hangs with an egg timer on the Symantec page.

updated it to allow ms dos aswell as pc dos,
and tried it through ms dos instead...
same problem.


so i went looking for some freeware or trials for similar ghosting/cloning software.
most of them don't allow cloning to a larger drive in the trial version.
can anyone recommend one to me?
i don't do regular cloning, and yes i'm a cheapass.

dave

[Jiff Lemon]

To clone it all you need is the dos boot disk. I'm fairly certain the Ghost CD is bootable too.

Boot off floppy/cd, Clone drive a to dive b.

[davidclayton]

tried to ghost boot disk from floppy on ms dos...
same egg timer freezing screen, and when i press a key:

"an internal stack overflow has caused this session to be halted. change the STACKS setting in your CONFIG.SYS file, and then try again."

what!?!


help?

[directhex]

alternatively, buy the superior Powerquest DriveImage, which doesn't rely on a crappy PC-DOS backend (it relies on a snazzy WIndows XP PE backend)

[Anders]

I must admit up front that I have little idea what could be going wrong, but the error message is telling you change the "STACKS=" value in the file named "config.sys" on your boot disk. Now what I have done is a fair bit of messing around with DOS boot disks.

I would try opening the config.sys file on your boot disk in something like notepad and changing the numbers that appear after "STACKS=". There will be two numbers after "STACKS=", separated by a comma. Some settings to try could be "0,0", "9,128" and "9,256".

If you are interested, the first number represents the number of stacks, the second number represents the size of each stack. Using the "0,0" setting disables something I think. HTH

[Anders]

I did a bit of Googling and found a couple of links that explain a bit more about the STACKS parameter.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...kb;EN-US;84300
http://www.computerhope.com/ac.htm

Apparently the ranges for the two numbers after "STACKS=" are 8 to 64 and 32 to 512 respectively, i.e. "STACKS=64,512" is the maximum value.

The Microsoft link above says this:
"If a "stack overflow" or "exception error 12" (stack exception) error occurs, increasing the number and size of stacks specified in CONFIG.SYS may solve the problem (for example, STACKS=18,256).

Note: STACKS= only affects hardware interrupts. If the stack being overflowed (trying to store too much information) is internal to an application, this will probably not solve the problem.".

So this might actually have been a waste of time, sorry.