Backup Software - Drive Image 7 ghost image won't restore to a clean hard drive

Author

Drive Image 7 ghost image won't restore to a clean hard drive

mcfehn

2006-07-24, 1:12 pm

I hope someone can give me a decent answer to this problem. Thank you
in advance for any help you might be able to give. Here's the deal:

I keep weekly backup images on a secondary hard drive. I have used
them many times to restore my system after a bad install. Last week,
however, I tried to put one of my ghost images onto a clean hard drive
and it failed big time. Here's what happened: I used Window Washer's
erase utility to wipe out my C drive (yes on purpose). Then I
attempted to restore a backup image onto the drive. After completing
the restoration process...I rebooted the computer only to get the
following error message: "Windows could not start because of a
computer hard disk configuration problem. "Could not read from
selected boot drive."

Now, I had used this backup image just days before to restore my system
and it worked fine. I am completely confused as to why it would not
restore to a clean drive.

I went into the Drive Image recovery browser to make sure the backup
data had been written onto the C drive...and it was all there. But
after trying several more times to restore...I kept getting the same
boot error message. Even rewriting the MBR did not help.

Since I knew my data was on the disk, I went ahead and did a Windows
repair. Luckily, that worked and only minor program reinstalls were
necessary afterwards.

While I'm happy to be back to where I was...I still am looking for
answers as to why a ghost image would not take on a clean drive. Is
that what I have to look forward to if my hard drive were to actually
fail someday? I thought the purpose of a ghost image was to get you
back up and running in a matter of minutes if you had to replace the
drive. And is it possible the erase utility wrote some bad data to the
disk causing the problem?

I would still like to restore to that ghost image (just out of pure
curiosity) if I could only figure out why the boot error keeps coming
up...keeping in mind the backup image itself is in good condition as
was used just days ago to perform a restoration. The only difference
is that it was done with data already on the disk. It was only after
erasing the disk that I got the boot error message after the restore.

I hope I haven't confused anyone and would like some suggestions if you
have any.

Thanks,

Mike

User

2006-07-28, 1:13 am

What was the size of the old hard drive? And the size of the new hard
drive? And how old is your pc and is your bios up to date? All those
are possible factors.

Since you said you had succeeded in the past, did you Window-Washer the
old drives or just reuse them for restoring? Maybe Windows Washer
erased something different, especially if you had an older small (less
than 120gb) drive and now you have large drives.

Finally, if backup integrity and recovery are important, why are you
still using Drive Image 7? DI7 has been superseded by Ghost 9,
superseded by Ghost 10, superseded by Norton Save & Restore. I would
say Drive Image 7 is about 3, maybe 4 years old.

Suggestion: get a current version of Ghost (or other) imaging software
and retire DI7.

mcfehn

2006-07-29, 1:13 am

My computer is about three years old. I'm still using Drive Image 7
because after using the trial of Ghost 10, I came to the conclusion
that the folks at Norton don't know what the hell they're doing now
that they took over the drive image platform. It was the buggiest
piece of software I have ever used. That's why I'll stick to DI7.

Anyway, I finally figured out my problem. I ended up having to use the
Windows XP disk to do a bootcfg_/rebuild. Why, I still have no idea
but at least I'm back to where I was.

Thanks for the help.