Ghosting a dual-boot system

[Pensionada]

We are a small training center for elderly people. All of us are volunteers. Through a grant we just received 10 new (identical) systems and we decided to make them dual-boot. (XP/Vista). We installed everything, the OS, applications and data on one system, on 3 partitions (C=XP, D=Vista, E=Data). Next we wanted to clone this on all other systems.

Using Acronis TrueImage Home 11 we made a backup on an external disc and a bootable CD with the program.

After the restore on a new system, XP turned out to be running OK, but Vista does not.

When starting Vista we get the following error:

Title Bar: Rundll32.exe Entry Point Not Found

Message: The procedure entry point SdbGetAppCompatDataSize could not be located in the dynamic link library apphelp.dll.

This is soon followed by other errors and a "Your user profile was not loaded correctly"...

Also, we noticed that C and D drives get switched in a real funny way. This happens also in XP!

Googling we found a similar problem reported in Technology questions, but no responses.

We need to have all 10 systems running by the end of this week and the only solution now seems to re-install Vista (and all its applications) on all systems by hand, which seems so dumb....

Please advise

[IcemanND]

what happens if you remove a drive from a target machine put it into the machine that is complete and do a disk to disk image? Does it boot properly then?

Could be TrueImage Home 11 doesn't like Vista? Don't know I use either Norton Ghost or WIM's for all of my imaging.

[Pensionada]

what happens if you remove a drive from a target machine put it into the machine that is complete and do a disk to disk image? Does it boot properly then?

Could be TrueImage Home 11 doesn't like Vista? Don't know I use either Norton Ghost or WIM's for all of my imaging.

We have avoided taking discs out so far, but it may be worth a try.

TrueImage 11 is advertised as supporting Vista, so it should work. I have also asked Acronis' support team for advise, but they are kind of slow to react.

We will try again tomorrow morning.

[Pensionada]

My final mail on this:

After trying all combinations of cloning and restoring that we thought might help, we gave up on trying to do this the smart way and made our copies the tough way.

So, what we did successfully:

1. We created one master system with XP and its applications on C, Vista on D, and shared data on E

2. Using Acronis TrueImage 11 Home we made a copy of the XP-partition on a USB-disc

3. On the new systems (the clones) we restored the XP-partition; not the MBR or track 0

4. On the clones we used Partition Magic to create the partitions.

5. We installed Vista in Partition D

6. We installed the Vista applications in partition D

7. We copied the data to partition E

8. We finalized the settings and Faronics Deepfreeze

9. We used VistaBootPro to change the start-up prompts and default

10. Steps 3 thru 9 were repeated 9 times (for each of the clones)

In retrospect: TrueImage turned out to be good for XP; at least we only did everything once there. My feeling is that either TrueImage has some flaws with Vista and dual-boot and/or with the combination with Faronics Deepfreeze.

I have reported the problem to Acronis.

This was a one-time action, so my interest in solutions is academic from now on.

Thank you all for your support!

[bmhome1]

I've restored identical dual-boot partition set-ups with TI Home 11 numerous times. Make C XP partition active, D Vista primary. Restore XP first and boot. Restore Vista and boot, will error and require repair from Vista DVD, sometimes several passes. Finally, restore dual-boot option with Vista Boot Pro to reconfigure boot option again back to XP.

[Pensionada]

Wish I had read this before.

Anyway, I strongly suspect that Faronics Deepfreeze was the main cause of the problem.

[Andromeda43]

Just for the record, Norton's Ghost 2003, run from a boot disk (floppy or CD) will completely copy one HD to another HD with NO loss of anything. It does NOT care what the format is on the original HD. It will make an exact mirror image of the original HD to the receiving HD.

An external HD of sufficient size can be used to transport the Image of one computer to another (Identical) computer.

Remember, this is an identical image, not a compressed image file, so the size of the receiving HD must be large enough to hold the complete image.

Cheers Mates!

Andromeda43 B)

[Pensionada]

I am ready to believe you, but before we even started I had a long chat with a Symantec technical expert and he/she assured me that Ghost 2003 does not support Vista and that Ghost 2008 (or whatever the last version is) would not ghost a dual-boot system.

Hence we bought Acronis TrueImage and the rest is history.

[IcemanND]

Well for one Ghost 2003/2008 are really the home versions. the Ghost Solutions Suite 2.0 is the Vista compatible enterprise version of Ghost and should handle it just fine. You have to use a switch to capture the entire boot record correctly but it should work just fine other than that.

[bmhome1]

I've seen endless issues reported trying using Ghost of any version or any form accomplishing that mission. Forget different sizes drives and/or partitions size changes. Acronis technique does them all, repeatedly for me from direct experience.