unable to boot with ghost corp cd to clone 1:1 !

[ceez]

hello everyone!

hope I am posting in the correct section.

i am trying to ghost a 40gig drive intoa 250gig drive, both IDE's, connected as 40gig master and 250gig slave on the primary IDE.

there are 2 cdrom, same setup, master & slave both on the 2nd ide

Now, mind you this is not the first time i clone drives since we do this occasionally at work but I've never had any problems.

The error I get when it attempts to read the CD is the following:

1. hd system type-(00)

boot disk failure

At first I thought, well it might be their cdplayers they might be a bit 'old'. this pc is a 700mhz AMD/256ram clone pc. so i changed it for a spare 52x cdRW that i have lying around....no dice.

I tried bartPE's disk and still no go.

BUT after many attempts, the bart cd began booting but it froze at the progress bar "booting bartPE". the cdrw would try to read, spin up-spin down but no go.

I know the boot CD's work cause I tried them on my computer and they boot up fine.

what the heck could be going on, this is a simple 'transaction'

thanks for your time and help,

ceez

Edited January 17, 2007 by ceez

[jaclaz]

Things that come to my mind (pardon me if they are too "basic" for your level of knowledge):

1) Incorrect BIOS settings (need to set HD detection to "AUTO" or manually change it to the right drive)

2) Incorrect master/slave or CS setting on the drive(s) (check jumpers)

3) Bad cable(s) (try with another one)

4) Incorrect connection of the cables, if they are the 80 conductor ones Master and slave are coded as "black" and "grey" respectively, while Motherboard side is "blue":

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html

5) Conflict with the "other" CD drive (disconnect it temporarily)

As a side note, and as a general rule, when Ghosting or however transferring large amounts of data between hard disks, having them on two different IDE channels is a good idea, to avoid possible bottlenecks on the single channel.

jaclaz

[ceez]

thanks jaclaz for your help....man no advice is ever to 'basic' how you say! help is always apprecitead.

the bios did detect the drives: primary 40 / secondary 136 (even though it's 250 the darn bios reads 136)

i tried master/slave and cable select on both drives with no luck.

i did not try another ide because i figure that the one it's on now works, but now i will

i did disconnect their original cdr and cdrw and just left my spare cdrw as the only optical drive.

i will try to connect the 250 drive on the 2nd ide along with the cdrw and see what happens.

i'll try later on when i have a chance and let you know of the outcome.

thanks again!

ceez

Edited January 17, 2007 by ceez

[CoffeeFiend]

the bios did detect the drives: primary 40 / secondary 136 (even though it's 250 the darn bios reads 136)

There you go. Your BIOS doesn't support LBA48. Check if there's a BIOS upgrade available for it, or consider using a PCI IDE controller (HighPoint, Promise, Silicon Image, etc) instead or such.

[ceez]

@ crahak, thanks for the info. unfortunately i did not think of that. if i am not mistaken during my many attempts of disconnecting/connecting drives I think i tried booting it with it's original 40gig and still no go. as soon as I get a hold of the pc again i will give it a try with an ide controller card.

thanks again everyone,

ceez

[LLXX]

Try running Ghost.exe with this switch to bypass BIOS limitation:

-ffi Prefers the use of direct IDE access for IDE hard-disk operations.

Edited January 20, 2007 by LLXX