Computer Geeks, Norton Ghost Imaging problem.

[JohnyCanuck]

I am running XP home edition and used Norton 2002 to image my 40gig Western Digital hard drive onto a set of 9 CDs using the high compression option (only about 15 gig actually used on the drive). The copy to CD appeared to go OK and completed successfully. Then to see how well it worked, I installed a Maxtor 40gig hard drive (different brand than original) and moved the IDE cable from my original hard drive and plugged it into the new Maxtor drive, rebooted the PC with a Win 98 boot diskette and Fdisked the new drive to create a single 40 gig partition (did not fomat).

I then rebooted again with a Norton Ghost boot diskette and restored the image from the CDs onto the new hard drive. The process appeared to complete suceesfully with no error messages etc. and Norton Ghost informed me that the process completed successfully. However, when I boot off the new hard drive it starts to boot up normally but at the point where I usually see the blue screen with my two accounts available to click on to log in and the shutdown option on the bottom left of the screen, I just get a light blue screen with a Windows XP home edition logo and nothing else and it just hangs there. Ctrl Alt Delete does nothing.

I was wondering if this could be the XP copyright protection mechanism kicking in because it sees that the hard drive has changed, or could this be a result of restoring the image to an unformatted disk, but if that were the case I don't see how it would even start the boot process.

Now that I've got a second drive installed I guess I could hook up both hard drives and image the working drive directly onto the new drive, but in that case would I run into the same problem if I tried to boot off the new drive after a system failure.

Anyone have any thoughts or advice? It would be appreciated.

[GoodSpud]

1. You are correct about the format issue

If the drive not being formated was the problem you would never get to the login screen. You would get some sort of disk error long before that.

I don't think it is a product activation issue either. You would get some kind of message about that too.

If I had to hazard a guess I would think that something to do with accounts/permissions in XP did not get ghosted onto the CDs.

Sorry I can't be of more help.


T.D.P.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. Thanks for the input TDP. n/t

n/t