Norton Ghost V9 Disk Copy Issue - Please Help

[moores39 0]

Having just bought Ghost V9, I tried to create a complete disk copy (using the utility of the same name within Ghost) to a USB2 connected laptop drive.

 

The copy seems to work OK and when I swap the drives over (machine is a Dell D800 with BIOS level A11), it boots OK, up to the point of displaying the logon screen.

 

The problem is, whenever I try to log on, it waits for a few seconds as it logging on OK, then immediately says "logging off" as if I'd manually logged off.

 

It does this regardless of which user (local or domain) I try to use. Is this a known problems?

 

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

 

[evoltix 0]

Hey man, I have the same situation as you. I just recently bought a new hard drive for my laptop and also bought a usb drive enclosure to home the new hard drive. I bought Norton Ghost 9.0 and made a copy of my main drive to the new drive. I swapped the drives out and it booted fine and then when I logged in it waited then logged me off and I couldn't sign in. It truly sucks and it's very frustrating. I have turned everywhere and I can't find out why it does this. If you've found anything tell me. Thanks.

[evoltix 0]

Norton Ghost is garbage, just use Trueimage 8.0. They have a free trial for it and I cloned my drive in 1 hour and it works gracefully.

[fmenard123 0]

Just cloned my drive and restored to a brand new Hitachi 7200 rpm travelstar.

 

A good old Windows 98 Fdisk/mbr will erase the signature on the drive and XP will stop logging you off.

 

-=Francois=-

 

[Wilhelmus 1]

...or you can use Windows XP recovery console command: fixmbr.

[theefool 0]

Official answer about ghost and Raid.

Essentially, the answer is NO. But, if you have Raid 1, you can break the mirror, then ghost a drive....

 

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/gho...svy=&csm=no

 

 

[rrledford@gmail.com 0]

When you Ghost a bootable WinXP drive to a new drive - ALWAYS boot the new drive ALONE on the target system and RE-BOOT as soon a you get the "new H/W detected" message referring to the new HDISK. This prevents the new drive getting locked in on a D:(or other bogus) drive letter assignment. The symptom of locking up at the login screen indicates that the drive got locked on to a Drive letter other than the C:.

This happened to me when I just swapped the cables IDE1 & IDE1 after ghosting - thinking this would reverse my letters. Instead, I got a new 120GB drive booting on IDE1 as D: and my old filled up 20GB as C: on the IDE2 channel. This produced the login to lockup senario. Simply re-ghosting the 120G drive to a spare 40G and then ghosting back, then booting the 120G by iteslf fixed the problem.

[therip 0]

RRLedford,

 

I had the same problem with Ghost 9.0 and Windows XP, but found a SOLUTION that turned out to be pretty simple (finding the solution was hard, invoking it was easy). And you are correct, the problem was because my existing drive was "locked" as the C: drive. However, my solution was a little different and I didn't have to re-ghost and ghost back. Since I couldn't boot into Windows with the new hard drive alone, I never got the "new H/W detected" message so I tried another tack.

 

For background, like moores39, I Ghosted my existing 30 GB drive to my new 80 GB drive and then cabled the drives to make the 80 GB the master and the 30 GB the slave. It booted up just fine and all the files from the old drive seemed to have correctly copied to the new drive. However, I found that the C: drive is still the 30 GB drive and the D: drive is the 80 GB. Huh? So, I unhooked the 30 GB drive and cabled just the 80 GB drive (setting the jumpers correctly, of course). Now on boot up it hung at the initial Windows blue screen and went no further.

 

I did some exploring on-line and tried fixmbr and fixboot and turning off System Restore. All with no luck. However, from this and other message boards I became convinced that the issue is that the 30 GB drive is "locked" as the C: drive and the 80 GB is locked as the D: drive. Of course, Norton or Windows XP doesn't even talk about this.

 

Now, here is what I found that worked. With the 80 GB as the master and the 30 GB as the slave, I booted into Windows (of course, I am booting into the 30 GB drive). From there I modified the registry by running "regedit" from the command line and traversing to:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> MountedDevices

 

Looked for \DosDevices\C: and \DosDevices\D:

 

I changed these names by right-clicking on the Name, choosing Rename and changing the names as follows:

 

Renamed \DosDevices\C: to \DosDevices\X: (where X is not a disk drive that is in use).

Renamed \DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\C:

Renamed \DosDeivces\X: to \DosDevices\D:

 

After booting up, the 80 GB is now correctly the C:\ drive and the 30 GB is the D:\ drive. Just to make sure, I unhooked the 30 GB drive and booted with just the 80 GB drive. It came up with no problems.

 

I am now using the 30 GB drive as my backup. I assume that I will need to do the same funky stuff if I ever need to restore the data from the 30 GB drive.

 

Hope this helps as this has caused me tons of grief this weekend. But, persistence does pay off.

[Wilhelmus 1]

How To Restore the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q223188/

 

Unable to Log on if the Boot Partition Drive Letter Has Changed

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/249321

Quote:

CAUSE

This problem can occur if your Windows 2000* boot partition drive letter does not match the drive

letter assigned during the initial Windows 2000 Setup. Windows 2000 maintains a record of drive

letters in a registry based database and re-assigns drive letters based on

Globally Unique Identifiers (GUID) recorded for each volume.

Should the volume GUID change or be duplicated (by hard drive cloning software),

the original drive letter may not be re-assigned to the boot volume.

 

This may also occur if you break a system/boot mirror, and then attempt to boot to the old shadow

drive if the original primary drive is missing or inaccessible.

This is because the volume GUID for the shadow drive is different than that of the original

primary drive and does not get the same drive letter assigned.

* Should be same for XP.

 

[mikemiller 0]

Hi

 

I was getting the same error. I tried the suggested solution of editing the registry and changing the values of the drive letter. Same results. Actually even worse off now because I now BOTH my drives are doing the same thing! When I get to log in screen and enter my pwd, it keeps logging me off.

Anyone have any other fixes for this? This is driving me nuts.

All because of a stupid drive letter assignment!

 

 

Please advise..thx.

[tpackert305 0]

Hello,

 

I had the same problem upgrading the 40gb 4200 RPM drive to a 40 gb 7200 rpm drive in my HP TC1100. After many tries, here is what finally worked for me. I am running MS Win XP SP2 Tablet edition. Ghost 9.0

 

1 - Make sure there is NOT a Partition defined on the new drive. Use Control Panel >> Administrative Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management to DELETE the partition on the new drive, if there is one. After 8 tries with a partition there, it did not work no matter what. It worked the first time when I deleted the partition.

 

2 - I used an external case with a USB connector for the new drive. Make sure you turn off ALL of the AUTO PLAY options on the ISB drive BEFORE starting the copy. Otherwise, just when Ghost is finished, autoplay kicks in and then Ghost gets an error. I needed to select each of the file types, music, video, mixed and set the

 

3 - Start GHOST and do the DRIVE COPY

I clicked on the following:

Check Desitnation for file system errors

Resize Drive to fill unallocated

set Drive Active

Drive Letter is BLANK (your can't pick "C" at this step)

Copy MBR

 

4 - After the copy completed. I did a SAFE Removal of the Drive from the System Try option (just in case)

 

5 - Disconnected the USB drive.

 

6 - Shutdown the system

 

7 - Removed the old drive and installed the new drive

 

8 - Booted up in Safe mode successfully, went to check the Registry settings HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>>System>>MountedDevices and the DosDevices\C: looked like it had assigned itself to the new drive, so I did not change anything. I rebooted again and voila everything worked this time.

 

What a challenge to just get a new, faster drive installed. I thought Ghost would have made it easier than all that.

 

[tpackert305 0]

Hello,

 

I had the same problem upgrading the 40gb 4200 RPM drive to a 40 gb 7200 rpm drive in my HP TC1100. After many tries, here is what finally worked for me. I am running MS Win XP SP2 Tablet edition. Ghost 9.0

 

1 - Make sure there is NOT a Partition defined on the new drive. Use Control Panel >> Administrative Tools >> Computer Management >> Disk Management to DELETE the partition on the new drive, if there is one. After 8 tries with a partition there, it did not work no matter what. It worked the first time when I deleted the partition.

 

2 - I used an external case with a USB connector for the new drive. Make sure you turn off ALL of the AUTO PLAY options on the ISB drive BEFORE starting the copy. Otherwise, just when Ghost is finished, autoplay kicks in and then Ghost gets an error. I needed to select each of the file types, music, video, mixed and set the

 

3 - Start GHOST and do the DRIVE COPY

I clicked on the following:

Check Desitnation for file system errors

Resize Drive to fill unallocated

set Drive Active

Drive Letter is BLANK (your can't pick "C" at this step)

Copy MBR

 

4 - After the copy completed. I did a SAFE Removal of the Drive from the System Try option (just in case)

 

5 - Disconnected the USB drive.

 

6 - Shutdown the system

 

7 - Removed the old drive and installed the new drive

 

8 - Booted up in Safe mode successfully, went to check the Registry settings HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>>System>>MountedDevices and the DosDevices\C: looked like it had assigned itself to the new drive, so I did not change anything. I rebooted again and voila everything worked this time.

 

What a challenge to just get a new, faster drive installed. I thought Ghost would have made it easier than all that.

 

[werter 0]

I found the solution: Norton Ghost 9 is not compatible with System Restore of Windows XP and Intel Application Accelerator or any other third parts hard disk drivers: Windows freeze on logon.

So, before cloning you should disable Windows XP System Restore and uninstall any third parts hard disk drivers and then the cloned hard disk will boot.

Remember also to select the options like "set drive active (bootable)" and "copy MBR" (I don't know why they are disabled by default!)

[james1 0]

Norton Ghost 9.0 is MOST UNRELIABLE in its COPY DRIVE function, at least under XP SP2.

 

IF YOU VALUE YOUR TIME ABOVE MINIMUM WAGE RATE (UK), then DITCH GHOST 9.0 AT LEAST FOR THIS JOB AND GET Acronis True Image 8 NOW, and use it.

 

After a day's struggle with Ghost 9.0 I did this, it worked first time, I didn't even have to read the True Image manual to do it right.

 

:)So I gave up the Ghost.

 

The problem:

 

See other assorted posts in this site and also under http://radified.com. It happens even when you are simply copying to a new disk on the IDE cable, i.e. you want to move to a bigger disk !! - never mind USB connections.

 

Seems to be:

 

Suppose we clone/copy C: (master) to D: (slave)

You do that, then change the jumpers to make D: master, and disconnect old C:

 

But after copying disks, XP still keeps original disk IDs in D: Master Boot Record and in Registry (which has come from C: of course )

 

When the new disk boots, the copy program has not fixed this, and it still thinks it is D:, but registry reckons all the software is on C:, which is no longer there. So it starts up the OS and hangs on the Win XP splash screen.

 

Various hairy fixes are suggested on this and other forums

(don't bother even to try and get support from Symantec)

1. Change the registry disk entries

2. Delete the registry disk entries

3. Edit the master boot record on D:

4. Disable the XP System Restore

- some of which seem to work for some of the people some of the time. I tried 3. without success; also Ghost options of copying it and not copying the MBR.

1 & 2 seem like a good way to make both disks inaccessible. I left these ideas alone.

 

[shanamc 0]

tpackert305 - Thanks very much for your posted solution. Once I deleted the primary partition on the destination drive prior to cloning, it worked like a charm the first time around. I now have a much faster and higher capacity master drive.

 

Regards,

 

Shanamc

 

 

[Nag 0]

I have wasted FIVE hours trying to make a drive copy with Norton Ghost before I did a google search and came to this forum. Following you guys' suggestion and installed True Image 8, and lo and behold, it simply WORKS, within an hour!

 

Ghost is such a piece of crap!

 

PS: Man, I registered an account of this forum just for this message, so you know how frustrated I was...

[Nag 0]

Oh, I forgot to say thanks to you guys.

[drace3000 0]

I came across the same problem with Ghost version 10. Followed all the prompts and cloned boot drive. Disconnected source boot drive then went to reboot. It got me to the login then logged me out for reasons stated in this thread.

 

You should not have to jump through hoops just to get this product to work especially a version 10 of the product. The only suggestion I took was to try Acronis True Image and yes it did work first time and does all the renaming of the drive for a boot drive and did it the first time through.

 

I called and got a refund on Ghost and will purchase Acronis for about the same price.

 

Thanks for this thread as a valuable time saver.

[cabena 0]

Tried cloning hard drive to hard drive two times, after carefully following the instructions from Norton Ghost version 10.0, on the same computer. My computer kept logging off after cloning into my new hard drive with Norton ghost, so I decided to use Acronis True image home 9.0

Unlike Ghost, True Image Home do the job in the right way by first copying from your old hard drive, before windows start. Everything went smooth..don't even think about buying Norton Ghost if it's for that purpose. No idea about the other options because i never used

[jwballance 0]

I had similar problems using Ghost 9.0 to upgrade the hard drive in a laptop computer (Toshiba Tecra M2 running XP Pro) (which can only accept a single hard drive). My solution was to add a couple of steps to what therip posted earlier in this thread.

 

Here's what worked for me:

 

With the new hard drive mounted in an external USB enclosure, I used the Ghost 9.0 Copy Drive feature to copy the internal hard drive to the external drive.

 

Here's where the process differs for laptop users that can only install a single hard drive in their machine - they need to update the registry on the new hard drive before they install the drive. Here's how to do this:

 

After completing the Copy Drive function, go to Start, Run, and type Regedit to start up the Registry Editor.

 

Click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and then under the File menu, select Load Hive...

 

Browse to the external hard drive:\Windows/System32/Config folder, select System, and click Open. The dialog will ask you to name the Hive - use any name (e.g. fubar), and click OK.

 

Now select Mounted Devices in "fubar" (or whatever Hive name you used), and look for \DosDevices\C: and \DosDevices\E: (the drive letter for your external drive).

 

As therip says,

Rename (right click on the item and select Rename) \DosDevices\C: to \DosDevices\X: (where X is not a disk drive that is in use).

Rename \DosDevices\E: to \DosDevices\C: (where E: is the drive letter for your external drive)

Rename \DosDevices\X: to \DosDevices\E:

 

You can confirm that you have now reversed the order of the drivers in your external drive by looking at MountedDevices in the SYSTEM folder of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (which shows the settings on the original hard drive). The keys for the C: and E: drives should be reversed in the Fubar Hive.

 

Highlight Fubar, then go to File. Select Unload the Hive, and confirm the Unload Dialog with OK. This process will update the registry on your external drive to the proper settings to now be installed into the laptop and boot successfully. Shut down your laptop, remove the original hard drive and install the new hard drive, and power up. All should work properly now.

 

I've seen other posts that suggest that you may have to reboot after the new hard drive is detected by Windows, but that was not the case for me.

 

Thanks to therip for pointing the direction to fixing this problem.

 

 

[dleach02 0]

After wasting the better part of a weekend I wanted to post another solution. Please note that this is with Ghost v14 but I ran into a similar problem. I was moving to a larger disk and fromm what I could tell the Ghost worked except it wouldn't present me with a login.

 

I got intouch with Norton support and explained the situation and they walked me through the solution.

 

The base problem is that if you ghost from one drive to another and the target drive has a drive letter associated with it then you will run into the problem. The solution is to make sure there isn't a drive letter associated so delete any partitions using the disk manager in XP.

 

Now use Ghost to duplicate the drive. Select the source boot drive (probably C:) then select the destination drive. This time Ghost will provide you with a list of drives and the drive you want to select with just have a * instead of a drive letter.

 

In my case, an hour later I now had a cloned drive C on the new drive and when I reconfigured my system with this new drive as the master everything came up correctly.

 

So to repeat, the key is to make sure there are no partitions on the target drive. If you have a partition, delete it so that your copy of windows will not associate the drive to a drive letter.

 

I pointed out to Symantec support that they should document this better.

 

Hope this update helps others that may run into this problem.