Trouble: restoring ghost image to new laptop HDD

SBMongoos

Odd. I bought a brand new drive. I did a complete backup of the original drive using Ghost 9.0. I restored the image to the new drive and it worked fine. I installed what I thought were the correct drivers (triple checked) from Intel for the laptop chipset as my external USB drive was causing the laptop to reboot. Seems something became corrupted on the new drive that I restored the image to. So, I simply reformatted the drive and reloaded the image again.

Now, it boots up to the login point. I enter my login and pwd. It plays the sound as though Windows XP (Pro) is going to load but then immediately plays the sound the system makes when exiting Windows and I'm taken right back to the login screen. I've formatted and restored the image about 3 times now and get the same result.

Odd it worked the first time just fine.

One thing comes to mind. The first time I did this, and had success, the original HDD was in the laptop, I backed up the original drive up to as USB drive attached to my desktop and then did the restore from the desktop USB drive across the network to the laptop to another attached USB case with the new drive. The restore has not worked since and these 'restores' that haven't worked were completed while actually being attached to the desktop via USB with the new laptop HDD. Make sense?

Any ideas?

kryyst

Could be that it's not finding the correct mount points for Documents and Settings folder because of the way you were making your images through usb/network hops something my have gotten written wrong. But that's just a guess. Could be looking for the wrong drive.

SBMongoos

yea....was doing enough yesterday that I may have forgot something that I may have done differently.

When formatting under Disk Mngmt in WinXP Pro it asks you to assign a drive letter or not to. I don't remember if I did the very first time when the process worked. Doesn't seem like it.

Recently I tried the process again. WinXP did assign a drive letter. Didn't work in laptop again so I booted off of WinXP CD and reinstalled Windows. Odd thing was I noticed that the OS saw the drive as letter M: which is what the Desktop PC assigned it when formatting the drive. No doubt with the registry seeing everything on drive C: (again for the laptop) this would be a huge problem. The OS was asking to install various programs that were already on the disk because it didn't see them on M: as opposed to C:.

I'm doing the process over and this time not assigning a drive letter during the format. Ghost allows you to restore to a drive without a drive letter assigned. I have to say though this doesn't seem familiar. We'll see what happens. Find it odd that I had problems after updating the drivers for the Intel chipset. Reason for doing so was the IBM Travlestar (USB 2) case was causing the laptop to reboot. This has happened on my desktop as well. So I installed the latest chipset drivers from Intel and the problem stopped on the desktop. I believe the first Intel update I tried to do on the laptop yesterday may have been the wrong version. I used Norton Go Back to roll back the system out of paranoia. Then ran the Intel chipset update for the right version and then Norton Go Back later said there were bad sectors on the new drive. WTF?? Drive is fine as I used the Hitachi software to test the hell out of it. Go Back was stuck in a loop and wouldn't let me roll the system back. Said it couldn't restore the MBR or the BRB (BRB or smiliar...??).

We'll see what happens this time.

SBMongoos

I know this should work fine and I don't believe that Windows assigning a drive letter while formatting has any affect. When you switch systems the OS on the machine it's attached to simply assigns the drive letter. I tried a restore from Ghost again and this time I rec'd an error. First for that.

I wanted this drive to be partitioned anyway so I'm starting from scratch.

kryyst

Yeah I'm really not sure what's going on but the only thing I can think of is it's looking for a drive that didn't exist at the time. Laptops are a pain to ghost from and to.

SBMongoos

Curious. If you partition a hard drive (C/D) isn't it better to keep the pagefile on C and have it to the top of the defrag graph (middle of drive I presume) than put the pagefile on the D partition.

I'm thinking along the idea of two physical drives which, of course, is different. But is there any performance gain by having the pagefile placed on partition D. I can't see it myself since it's one drive and not two.

Or...would it be good as C is more likely to become fragmented than D so the pagefile wouldn't be as affected?

kryyst

If you have only 1 drive you should have it at the start of the drive as physically that part of the drive is smaller so it'll read faster. The drive will fragment regardless of where you put the pagefile as every write/delete potentially can cause fragmentation. Now if you have multiple drives there is an advantage to moving the page file to a less active drive so the head can stay on the pagefile more often.

SBMongoos

to defrag. Is there a way to move the Pagefile to the front of C:? Perfectdisk seems to like to move the Pagefile to the middle of the drive.

kryyst

Actually that may be the best place for it if your head is resting in the middle of the drive most of the time it's equal distance to the front or back of the platter. I was actually thinking more of Linux and it's swap partition which likes to reside at the beginning of the disk. Difference being linux - compared to windows - seldom hits the swap disk if you have atleast 500mb of ram. Where as windows just likes to randomly swap for no apparent reason regardless of ram size.