Ghosted disk wont boot XP

[killie99]

I have a system that I wish to change the hard drive in so I have Ghosted (version 8)the current 120Gb drive to a new 250Gb drive. I removed the 120Gb drive, installed the 250Gb drive as the master and it won't boot XP - it comes up with the XP splash screen and hangs just before the user login screen.
I ***think*** it might be related to the original drive being assigned as drive "G" rather than drive "C" and the system is re-assigning the new drive as drive "C" rather than drive "G" (hope that makes sense).
Is there any way to either reassign the original drive to drive "C" (and then hopefully the ghost process will work) or is there some way to hack the ghost that I already have on the new drive? I know the disk management tool in XP will not let me reassign the "G" drive as "C" since it is the boot drive, are there any programs out there that will let me change the drive letter (and re-configure all the loaded programs to run from "C"!).
Hopefully someone can help.

[Nox]

You haven't switched from IDE to SATA have you? Will it let you get into safe mode/command prompt?

There is a prog called ghost explorer - lets you extract bits out of ghost images, not sure about re-inserting though. May help, a little - its part of the full ghost suite.

Nox

[killie99]

ide-ide, no SATA anywhere. Can't boot into safe mode. If I insert the XP installation disk I can select repair and get to the c: prompt and see everything on the disk but I've no idea how to attempt to repair it.

[probspot]

if your seing the c prompt then your getting into the recovery console.

You should insert the winXP disk get to the initial text phase where it says do you want to install and repair and choose install (as if your are re-installing), it should the find your installation then select repair....if you see what i mean.

If it doesn't see your installation, you could always try using the recovery console (the c prompt your seeing) to run 'bootcfg /rebuild' .....go thru the motions and then try to repair again.

[killie99]

did a repair and I can now log into windows and all my accounts are available. Problem is that no apps will run because they think they should be running from drive "G". Is there any way I can reallocate this drive as "G"? Does partition magic let me do that?
Another way I thought of getting round the problem is to create 5 partitions on the 250Gb drive and re ghost the image onto what would be the equivalent of the "G" drive (partition 5).
Any thoughts before I go down that road?

[probspot]

Just recreate the drive that you had your apps on in, drive letter won't matter as you'd need to go back into windows and change it to g. Windows will automatically put the drive letter proceding the last drive letter (ie. your cd is 'D', you image, windows picks it up as 'E'). Anyways, change it in computer management / disk manager snap in once created - reboot, then all going well you'll have working apps. You should then be able to repartition as you wish for the remainder. Your drive letters may be a bit all over the place, but should work.

[killie99]

Disk management doesn't let you re-assign a drive/partition when it's the boot drive/partition, it only lets you re-assign data disks and cd/dvd drives...I think, so XP will not change the drive letter to "G" - or am I missing something?

[iranu]

did a repair and I can now log into windows and all my accounts are available. Problem is that no apps will run because they think they should be running from drive "G". Is there any way I can reallocate this drive as "G"? Does partition magic let me do that?
Another way I thought of getting round the problem is to create 5 partitions on the 250Gb drive and re ghost the image onto what would be the equivalent of the "G" drive (partition 5).
Any thoughts before I go down that road?

you can reassign boot letters for an exe's install path in the registry.

eg: run regedit > HKey_local machine > software then open the program's folder and replace the G with a C for all the entries.

G:/Program Files/Serious Sam Demo/bin/sam2.exe

This will be a labourious task if you have lots of programs.

[blueball]

There was a freeware program called coa (stands for change of address) which you can use do this if I remember correctly.

Unfortunately it isn't free now its $5

You can get it here:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1161203,00.asp

[killie99]

thanks bluebell, used COA2 and it recovered almost everything.

[sabot77]

I had a similar problem once. I had to put the drive into another machine running win2k or xp, go into the disk management snap-in and right click the partition I wanted to boot from and click "Activate".

You can only boot from an active partition, and the partition may not be being set as active merely by the ghost partition copy operation.

[impossible]

i had a similar problem recently.


Imp