Why can Ghost 2003 never clone a win-7 drive that is bootable ?!?!

[Nomen]

I've cloned XP dozens of times back in the day, with Ghost 2003, and the clone always booted.  I've rarely cloned a win-7 drive, but it seems that every time I do, the damn thing won't boot and I have to putz with a setup CD or drive tool of some sort to "fix it", but I never figure or am never told what the hell the problem was.  An example error is:  0XC000000e  The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.  Why isin't Ghost cloning this thing so that it's  bootable?  Is this a known thing for ghost 2003 or is there some ghost setting that I don't have right?  What bit or what-ever on the drive is not flipped in the right direction to cause this?

 

[jaclaz]

Well, AFAICR Ghost has more possible settings/parameters than stars in the sky, so you should post which ones you currently use (that fail) and also some details on how (EXACTLY) the windows 7 system you want to "clone" is configured (like Bios/Uefi, reserved partition or not, which bootmanager  - if not BOOTMGR - is involved, etc., etc.).

jaclaz

[Nomen]

I attached the clone drive via usb adapter to a running win-7 system and used drive management to set the second partition to active.  The drive has 2 partitions, the first one being very small (100 mb) named "System Reserved".  

I put the clone back in the target PC and tried booting it again, this time I got the message "bootmgr was missing.  Press cntrl alt delete"

I did the USB thing again with the drive and now set the first partition to active as well. So they were both set as active.  Put it back into the target and booted - still got the bootmgr message.   Maybe only the first partition must be set active - not the second?  How does win-7 deal with 2 active partitions on the boot drive?

Putzing around the net I found this:

"Bootmgr was introduced in Windows Vista which Microsoft released to the public on January 30, 2007. In previous versions of Windows, that's before Vista; a program referred to as NTLDR was the boot manager. This means that Windows XP users won't get the bootmgr is missing error.

Bootmgr is essential for the boot sequence to begin; without it, the operating system will not load. In other words, if ‘Bootmgr is missing’ then your computer won't boot. In this post, we discuss how to fix ‘Windows Bootmgr is missing’ errors in Windows."

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/05/02/fixing-bootmgr-is-missing-error-in-windows/

What I'm looking for now is a way to fix this boot mgr thing without having a win-7 CD handy but instead do it while the drive is attached to a running win-7 system via usb.  Is this possible?  I guess what I'm looking for is the equivalent to the dos "sys" command.  It doesn't look like the "diskpart" command shell can do this?

Maybe this will work?  Windows USB/DVD Download Tool https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=56485

Seems that BootRec.exe would work the best, but I can't find the damn file anywhere!  Ok, I've expanded winre.wim from the cloned drive and have a copy of that entire thing on my primary drive on the PC that the cloned drive is slaved to via USB.  Looking at the commands for bootrec /fixmbr I don't know how to tell bootrec *which drive* to operate on... ?

 

Edited December 31, 2019 by Nomen

[Tripredacus]

I use Ghost12 in DOS using "sector copy" (Disk to Disk) for Win7 and it works for spindle to spindle. It doesn't work going from spindle to SSD.

[jaclaz]

Well, you need first a primer on how (since Vista) a NT system boots, and the further changes in 7.

In Windows 7 the normal setup creates two partitions (both in MBR and GPT style disks):

1) the "system reserved" one, that is active and gets NOT a drive letter when the system is booted <- this one is called "System" by Microsoft and "Boot" by everyone else
2) the "normal" one containing the actual Operting System <- this one is called "Boot" by Microsoft and "System" by everyone else

See:

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/system.html

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/articles/windows_seven.html

The "system reserved" partition in a MBR style disk is marked "active" and contains only:

1) the BOOTMGR
2) the \boot\BCD file
3) some other (mostly language files) 

Allow me to doubt that you had at any moment two partitions active, as this is - besides not allowed - almost impossible to obtain with *any* "Normal" tool

To recap:

1) the "System reserved" partition needs to be active AND it must contain the file \BOOTMGR and the \boot\BCD
You can via disk manager or disk part assign temporarily a letter to it (when it is attached via USB to the other Windows 7 machine) in order ot check the contents of the (cloned) System Reserved partition.

or you can "flatten" the clone by simply copying to the root of the "normal" partition the contents of the "System Reserved" one, and make this latter partition active (this way you will have a "single partition install", not much different from a typical good ol' XP one.

Then it will either work or provide a different (hiigher level) error (like the 0XC000000e you mentioned that comes from \BOOTMGR or \boot\BCD), right now the "bootmgr is missing" comes from the bootsector/PBR of the *whatever* partition is active.

jaclaz

 

 

[Nomen]

Still reading your post, but just to comment:

> Allow me to doubt that you had at any moment two partitions active, as this is -

>besides not allowed - almost impossible to obtain with *any* "Normal" tool

Ah, yes.  I was wrong.  Disk Management shows in real time that when using command line diskpart to mark partition 1 or 2 active that only 1 of them becomes active - the other one (if active) becomes non-active.

So when the "system reserved" partition is Active, I get the first error in this thread upon boot (0XC000000e can't find required device).  When the second (and only other) partition is marked active, I get the "bootmgr" is missing message.  When this drive is slaved to active Win-7 system, system reserved becomes E drive and the other partition becomes F. 

E drive has bootmgr, bootsect.bak, $recyclebin (folder), Boot (folder), System volume information (folder). 

So I decide to copy bootmgr and Boot (folder) from E to F.  I can copy the Boot folder, but when I try to copy the bootmgr file (which I'm told is 382 kb) I get the message "You'll need to provide administrator permissions to copy this folder - Local disk"   ?  So all of a sudden bootmgr becomes a folder?

In any case, bootmgr and boot folder is present on "system reserved" partition, and that partition is marked active, and windows resides on the other partition and everything is there but something else must be wrong because the target system doesn't boot with this drive.  Could the slaving of this drive to another PC have imposed drive lettering to these paritions that is screwing stuff up and must be removed?

I still would like to know if bootrec.exe can be used to fix this, without having to somehow boot a win-7 install disk and mess around with recovery option.

 

Edited December 31, 2019 by Nomen

[Nomen]

Well I put the clone drive (as the only drive) in a PC with a CD rom drive and booted a win-7 CD and selected the repair and it did something very quickly and then put the drive back into the target pc and it booted up just fine.  I would like to know how to "fix" a drive like this in this state by slaving it to a working win-7 PC and performing what-ever system-level task or operation to the boot records or what-ever but I have not seen any such instructions on how to fix a drive like that under those conditions.

Happy new year, by the way.  It must be new year somewhere in the world by now.

 

 

Edited January 1, 2020 by Nomen

[jaclaz]

It depends on a number of factors, as said there are several ways to use Ghost and some values - notwithstanding the use of the word "clone" - may not be the same on the "copy".

As an example only (i.e. not necessarily what happened in your case) by definition there cannot be at the same time on a same Windows NT system two disk drives connected with the same Disk SIgnature, if - for any reason - this happens, the NT OS will immediately (and silently) changes one of the two to a new value.

If *anything* in the boot process relies on such data, the disk drive won't ever boot until either the Disk Signature is reverted to the original value or the *whatever* is updated to reflect the new Disk Signature.

But - back to the issue at hand - generically you had a 0XC000000e error coming in the early stage of booting from BOOTMGR.

The problem very likely comes from some of the settings in the \boot\BCD.

So the "usual" recommended fix is to run bootrec.exe with the switch /rebuildbcd, but the bootrec.exe is only available (normally) on the install CD/DVD or in the WinRE (the Recovery Environment that may - or may not - have been installed on a given machine).

But - besides bootrec - there are other tools that can be used, namely:

1) bcdboot
2) bcdedit

the above are included in a "normal" Windows OS, and - actually recommended :

3) BootIce

a freeware third party tool that is GUI and is easier to use than the previous two:

http://reboot.pro/topic/21956-bootice-v1332/

that can - besides editing an existing BCD or creating a new one - also allow to "fix" other possible issues (such as MBR or PBR missinf/corrupted, change active partition, et similia)

Anyway all three need a minimal amount of knowledge on the way the BCD is structured.

If you look on youtube there are a few tutorials for how to use bootice in these (and other) cases.

jaclaz

 

 

[Nomen]

Looking at web searches it's clear that I'm not the only one that has or would want to continue to use ghost 2003 to clone their windoze 7 drives but from one of my above posts it's clear that starting with vista and certainly with 7 that there is something about the ntfs boot or disk structure that ghost 2003 (and even newer versions) don't seem to know about or replicate correctly.  Ghost is not a sector-by-sector copier so it has to know about the logical structure of the file system it's dealing with when it clones drives.   It would be nice to find some instructions on what *exactly* to do, with what tools (bootrec.exe, bcdboot, bcdedit, bootsect, startrep, or other, etc) once a ghost 2003 clone has been made.  Maybe it's all here:  https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/article.100001014 or here: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/command-prompt-fix-issues-your-boot-records ?

On a slight tangent, I've looked at the radified website to find something definitive about the max hard-drive size that ghost 2003 can handle.  It seems that it can't clone a 2T drive.  I find it odd that I can't find such a basic parameter like that in the ghost faq on that site.  I wanted to create an account there to post a question about that, but I can't seem to find a way to create an account.

 

[dencorso]

Ghost is (and always was) able to perform full-drive sector-by-sector (dd like) forensic quality copies. On just has to use the command-line option -ir

[cdob]

On 12/31/2019 at 12:21 AM, Nomen said:

 An example error is:  0XC000000e  The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. 

There are new partitons at the new disk. 
The old \boot\bcd dosn't match the new disk. Booting fails.

Another approach: use locate
http://mistyprojects.co.uk/documents/BCDEdit/files/device_locate.htm

Set locate at the source system. Clone the disk next.

[Tripredacus]

On 12/31/2019 at 11:34 AM, jaclaz said:

Well, you need first a primer on how (since Vista) a NT system boots, and the further changes in 7.

In Windows 7 the normal setup creates two partitions (both in MBR and GPT style disks):

1) the "system reserved" one, that is active and gets NOT a drive letter when the system is booted <- this one is called "System" by Microsoft and "Boot" by everyone else
2) the "normal" one containing the actual Operting System <- this one is called "Boot" by Microsoft and "System" by everyone else

It is good to point this out. Of the two Ghost versions I have for DOS, as noted I use Ghost12 to image "standard" Win7 spindle disks, and because it supports the System Reserve partition, it is my go-to Ghost for imaging disks.

But I wanted to point out that Ghost7's DOS version can image a disk with Windows 7 that is installed without System Reserve partition.