Installed Norton Ghost and now cannot boot up

[cslg]

Having shown how to clean up my drives, I have walked into an unrelated problem. I resurrected a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 that I bought some time ago but had never used. Cannot remember exactly but during installation, I was told I should make a start up disk to which I replied 'yes' but before I was able to do it the installation finished and rebooted. In doing so, it only got as far as requesting a boot up CD or DVD which I did not have. I went in to the bios and changed the order so that the primary HDD would be read first. No luck. I was asked for a floppy. I have two internal drives, the primary has Win XP and the secondary has Win 98. Normally on boot up I get the choice for 30 secs to go to XP or 98. The default is XP. I cannot get in to the operating system and am stuck. Can anyone help me out of this, please? Thanks

[Takeshi]

Go to the Recovery Console,

type the following 3 commands and follow their instructions:

bootcfg /rebuild

fixboot

fixmbr

[cslg]

Thanks Takesh but how do I get to the recovery console. I sometimes get to the dos command prompt. Is that where I can start?

Thanks

[the_guy]

To getto the recovery console:

1. Put in your Windows XP CD

2. Boot from it (hit a key when prompted)

3. Press R at the first screen.

4. Log on to a windows Installation (c drive!)

5. Type your admin password

6. Now type those three commands.

7. Restart and hope for the best.

the_guy

[cslg]

Thanks again. I have already tried with the Win XP CD Rom and also set BIOS to read the CD ROM first but it just passes it over although I see the CD Rom being noted and asks for a floppy disc to be inserted. I also tried an old start up floppy for win 95 a computer I had in 1997! and that started off with a promising menu but everything I responded ended up with the dos command prompt from where I can read directories, incidentally.

I have another recent Symantec Norton Antivirus disc that says that it can act as boot up disc in an emergency. When I try it merely seems to test for viruses and then I get no futher.

Its a real puzzle. I'm sorry!

[Takeshi]

Something odd happened. I don't remember Ghost having to reboot the OS when it finished installation.

Did you see the message on top of the screen for about 3s:

Press any key to boot from CD...

Do you have a factory PC with its own OEM CD? If so the steps could well be different to repair the system.

[govtechie]

I don't know how to get out of your current problem, but I have done the Ghost 2003 install several times. If you do this again, don't make the boot disk during the installation of Ghost. You can always do it later. Once Ghost is installed, then you make a Ghost floppy which is a Dos boot disk with the ghost.exe on it also. Ghost makes the disk bootable with PC-DOS and then puts ghost on the same disk. With this disk and a floppy drive or a USB floppy that you can take from machine to machine you can create a ghost image of a personal computer and save it to CD. It takes me about 4 CDs for my images. Although I may soon start doing this with DVDs, so might be able to get a complete image on one DVD.

I also use Ghost off a network share and boot up to our network using a disk like Bart's Boot disk. It logins to the network in a Dos mode, then I run ghost from there.