Weird Ghosting Issue

I'm having a really annoying problem with a ghosted drive, and I could sure use some input. I've done ghosting quite a few times in the past, but where I work now, there's a specific procedure for ghosting student's hard drives and somewhere in the very long, seemingly convoluted process, things are getting mucked up and I can't figure out why. Which is where you fine folks come in...

So here it is. We have Ghost 7.5 on a USB stick, and I'm working with a Lenovo T60p in this case. We have an Ultrabay adapter that allows for a hd to be inserted where the optical drive normally goes. The procedure I'm supposed to follow is:
- with a spare HD installed in the main hard drive bay, boot to the USB stick
- change the "ghost" directory & enter the gdisk command to wipe the master boot record (I'm at home now and I don't have my notes with me, but I believe it's "gdisk <# of disk> /mbr"). This apparently prevents you from accidentally ghosting over the user's HD with the spare HD.
- shut down, insert the user's original HD in the ultrabay adapter & reboot to the ghost usb stick. Ghost the user's HD over to the spare HD.
- once ghosting is done, exit & shut down.
- remove the ultrabay adapter & insert the optical drive; insert the Vista install/repair disk
- when prompted, select your keyboard (US) and when prompted say that YES you would like to repair the problem with the HD (which is the spare drive that was just ghosted to and which needs to be told that it can be a nice, happy, bootable drive again)
- complete the repair process & reboot to the newly ghosted and theoretically now-bootable HD.

A couple things to mention:
- the original/user's HD is VERY FULL. It's a 100GB HD with only about 11GB left on it. Could be part of the reason his machine was uber-slow to begin with.
- the ghost process took a long time - over an hour.
- I tested all the hardware involved - all HDs tested fine, and I know those USBs have both worked in the past, and I also made sure that one of those drives I tried to ghost to could take an image by ghosting over a ready to go clean laptop image to it.
- when I try to boot off the ghosted drive, all I get is a blinking _ cursor...nothing else. Harumph.

I went through this procedure step by baby step, more than once and with multiple destination drives and with multiple ghost USB sticks. I could not for the life of me end up with a bootable copy. I've been a wing-man, so to speak, on previous ghostings like this during my training and it's always worked, and I've used ghost in the past countless times, and I've never had a ghosting process complete successfully without having the resulting drive be bootable...but then again, I've never done the part about monkeying around with the master boot record before I started at this job. I tested to make sure I could still boot off the user's original HD...to prove that the original drive was bootable and that I didn't accidentally do the gdisk mbr command on the wrong drive!

It's a somewhat high tension situation, as the office I work in recently took over this job of supporting students, and I don't want to make us look stupid by having overlooked some small detail in the ghosting process, but I also don't want to spend too much more time on this if it's something that can't be fixed.

So what am I missing here? Could the fullness of the user's HD be mucking up the process and resulting in an unstable image? I've spent so much time on this, and my recommendation at this point is this: the user has a cleanly imaged loaner HD in his laptop now, with his data copied over to it, and I say we have him clean out his duplicate files & unnecessary files (he's got at least 15GB of duplicate music & picture files on the original HD) and then we can ghost over that HD to his HD that we have in the office. That way, I can stop making myself batty over this, and the user will get a cleanly imaged HD with all his important data on it. It's a win win situation I think, but I'd also like to know what the blazes is making this ghosting process fail or if I'm doing something wrong...help? Input? Recommendations??

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Comments

Jordus

Does ghost still use sector-based imaging (as opposed to file-based) in version 7.5?

When you boot the Vista CD, choose command line and do the following commands

diskpart
select disk 0
active
exit

see if it boots after that.

Im not totally sure why you guys are using ghost when the process sounds more tedious than using WinPE/ImageX (which is free)

skrpune

Jordus wrote: »

Does ghost still use sector-based imaging (as opposed to file-based) in version 7.5?

When you boot the Vista CD, choose command line and do the following commands

diskpart
select disk 0
active
exit

see if it boots after that.

Im not totally sure why you guys are using ghost when the process sounds more tedious than using WinPE/ImageX (which is free)

I know, the process is a little long & wacky. I'm not totally comfortable with WinPE/ImageX although I'm studying up on it for the Windows 7 exam, so I can't really comment too much on that part. And I'm not sure of the mechanics of the ghosting process with version 7.5, but I do know that I can see the file names ticking by as the ghosting process happens...so that makes me think it's file based?

Anywho, the main goal and the overall procedure here is to copy over the user's original HD to a backup drive, boot off it to make sure it's a good image (although technically I can just insert it as a secondary drive in that ultrabay adapter & make sure I can see the data), then push a clean/new image of Vista onto the user's original hd, then transfer back their data to their newly imaged HD...and in turn make it just as bad and slow as it was to begin with if the user doesn't get rid of some of their data. GAK!

Oh, and we use a completely separate procedure (and a different version of Ghost) to push new/clean images for the laptops. Double GAK!! I know I'm still pretty new there and maybe I'm just not seeing why we do it this way, but the process seems a little extra-complicated to me.

I'll definitely give the command line stuff a go & see if I can get that puppy to boot. Like I said, I'm still not convinced that I want to do a file by file comparison of what the user has changed since we gave him the loaner drive & transfer even more files back to an already overly full hard drive, but I'd at least like to be able to say that I got a bootable ghost out of all this!!

WanBoy67

I can't tell you what the problem is. But for sure you shouldn't be messing about with student files. You want a laptop imaged? Great, take a backup first cause it's getting wiped. Forgot to backup those files? Too bad, we don't have time to piss about backing your stuff up for you. 90Gb are you serious!? At worst show them how to backup their files to an external USB drive using Easy Transfer Wizard. Unless of course EVERYTHING has been handed over to your department.

Ghosting can be a black art, where even seasoned experts can be left scratching their heads sometimes. Does it happen on other PCs as well with the same image? It could just be one of those difficult PCs were pandoras box never closes, no firmware update, no ghost image works. Nothing but a fresh install and a ghost backup to a hidden partition or spare HD for future use will work. Sometimes you are best to cut your loses... ie time

skrpune

WanBoy67 wrote: »

I can't tell you what the problem is. But for sure you shouldn't be messing about with student files. You want a laptop imaged? Great, take a backup first cause it's getting wiped. Forgot to backup those files? Too bad, we don't have time to piss about backing your stuff up for you. 90Gb are you serious!? At worst show them how to backup their files to an external USB drive using Easy Transfer Wizard. Unless of course EVERYTHING has been handed over to your department.

Ghosting can be a black art, where even seasoned experts can be left scratching their heads sometimes. Does it happen on other PCs as well with the same image? It could just be one of those difficult PCs were pandoras box never closes, no firmware update, no ghost image works. Nothing but a fresh install and a ghost backup to a hidden partition or spare HD for future use will work. Sometimes you are best to cut your loses... ie time

Yeah, I know...we VERY heavily recommend to folks that they do their own backup and we give them the option of us doing the data transfer for them if they want us to, but we make them sign a waiver saying that we're not responsible if all their data goes *POOF* in the process.

Ghosting from this "family" of laptop images has been done before, and it's gone well, but I don't think it's ever been done with this full of a hard drive.

I'm in the middle of trying to convince my boss to go with a hybrid solution - scrapping the written procedure, ghosting the student's drive to our network drive via our version of Ghost on a bootable utility CD, getting the student to clear out their duplicate data & unneeded files, and then ghosting that loaner he has now back to his original HD. The whole process would take 1-2 hours, versus another 4-5+ hours of ghosting, reimaging, reinstalling updates, and then copying back all his data...and still ending up with a poorly performing, overly full drive. I'm TOTALLY voting for cutting out losses on this one & going with what I think is the simple solution. Keep those fingers crossed that I can influence folks that way tomorrow!

WanBoy67

You could cut and paste the music-film-random ****-olsen twins folder out of the profile then take the profile. Delete temp files, hidden backups from windows updates in the Windows folder and the SoftwareDistribution folder should speed things up a little. Disable SystemRestore and Hibernate too.

Jordus

It sounds like a whole lot of wasted time if you are just removing vista, and then replacing vista and then dumping the files back.

Maybe not if it were a few files, but anyone with 90GB has way more than files just for school. Are these personal laptops or school loaners?

100GB for 1 hour is actually not terrible, thats a LOT of data to transfer.

skrpune

Jordus wrote: »

It sounds like a whole lot of wasted time if you are just removing vista, and then replacing vista and then dumping the files back.

Maybe not if it were a few files, but anyone with 90GB has way more than files just for school. Are these personal laptops or school loaners?

100GB for 1 hour is actually not terrible, thats a LOT of data to transfer.

They're personal laptops bought through the school...so they belong to the students, but part of the package is that we service them while they're under warranty (which is essentially during the time they are in school) and give them loaner equipment if necessary. I agree with you, it totally sounds to me like it would be a waste of time to do more transfers & more re-images than what's been done already. I am seriously hoping I win this debate over how to proceed tomorrow, especially since I'm probably going to be the one having to implement the solution.

rwwest7

Are you sure it's not a Ghost 7.5/Vista issue? That's a pretty old version of Ghost, we use Ghost 11. Is the reason for "when prompted say that YES you would like to repair the problem with the HD (which is the spare drive that was just ghosted to and which needs to be told that it can be a nice, happy, bootable drive again)" step because Vista doesn't like Ghost 7.5? That's a completely un-needed step. A ghosted HD should boot just fine if the original HD booted.

dynamik

Is the rest of the data being moved over correctly? Maybe there's just a problem with the MBR or something. I have no clue what I'm talking about; just throwing out a suggestion...

WanBoy67

rwwest7 wrote: »

Are you sure it's not a Ghost 7.5/Vista issue? That's a pretty old version of Ghost, we use Ghost 11. Is the reason for "when prompted say that YES you would like to repair the problem with the HD (which is the spare drive that was just ghosted to and which needs to be told that it can be a nice, happy, bootable drive again)" step because Vista doesn't like Ghost 7.5? That's a completely un-needed step. A ghosted HD should boot just fine if the original HD booted.

I have had this problem even with newer versions of Ghost. He is doing the Vista repair because he has wiped the MBR previously. I'll admit I don't do this step myself. But sometimes the Vista repair doesn't even work. Seems to be random sometimes, I have checked BIOS's for weird settings and can't always put my finger to it. It's not a regular thing but it does happen. Likewise with True Image and Universal Restore what should work simple didn't, even with proper drivers etc.

skrpune

rwwest7 wrote: »

Are you sure it's not a Ghost 7.5/Vista issue? That's a pretty old version of Ghost, we use Ghost 11. Is the reason for "when prompted say that YES you would like to repair the problem with the HD (which is the spare drive that was just ghosted to and which needs to be told that it can be a nice, happy, bootable drive again)" step because Vista doesn't like Ghost 7.5? That's a completely un-needed step. A ghosted HD should boot just fine if the original HD booted.

If I were just doing a simple ghost, that would be correct & no use of the Vista CD would be necessary...but the higher-up's apparently think folks are not savvy enough to ghost from/to the correct drives, so they make us do that extra step with the gdisk /mbr command so that we can't mess up the ghosting process. I get it - it sucks when someone messes up and ghosts from a blank drive to a user's hard drive. But it's pretty simple to do right - even though the hard drives are identical, you can tell which drive is which by looking at the number designation...the drive in the ultrabay adapter is drive 3, and the drive in the normal HD slot is drive 2. If you go in knowing that and can recognize numbers/symbols and can navigate to the correct source/destination drives in ghost, then it can be done without messing around with the master boot record.

But to be sure there's no accidental ghosting over the user's HD, they want us to do the extra step of the gdisk /mbr command to wipe the boot record...and then we HAVE to use the Vista repair cd in order to make that ghosted drive bootable again. But it's just not working with this *&$! drive! GAH!!!

I'm not sure what the cause is, but I'd bet it's not the Vista repair CD or Ghost itself being corrupt/old/whatever since these resources have been used by others in the past (witnessed by me so I KNOW they worked before) and have yielded successful results. There's just something about this particular user's HD and/or the steps that we've been given to do that is mucking up the process.

dynamik wrote:

Is the rest of the data being moved over correctly? Maybe there's just a problem with the MBR or something. I have no clue what I'm talking about; just throwing out a suggestion...

Good question - I had assumed that the other tech inserted the ghosted spare drive as a secondary drive in the ultrabay adapter to ensure that the data was there (since that would have been my next step if the original ghost didn't boot), but now that I think about it, he didn't say that he did and so I'm pretty sure that he didn't. The "procedure" is to make sure that the ghosted drive boots so you can be sure that you got a good ghost, but if all we're trying to accomplish here is getting a full copy of the user's data, then it doesn't really matter whether that ghosted drive boots up - it just matters that the data is there. So...maybe I've been going through trying to reghost this blasted drive for nothing?! Double GAH!!

skrpune

WanBoy67 wrote: »

I have had this problem even with newer versions of Ghost. He is doing the Vista repair because he has wiped the MBR previously. I'll admit I don't do this step myself. But sometimes the Vista repair doesn't even work. Seems to be random sometimes, I have checked BIOS's for weird settings and can't always put my finger to it. It's not a regular thing but it does happen. Likewise with True Image and Universal Restore what should work simple didn't, even with proper drivers etc.

Yup, you're right...I was just a lot more long-winded with my response (as I tend to be, brevity is not my forte

) and you beat me to it. I guess maybe it's just a fluke if the Vista repair doesn't always work - I've never done this before and I couldn't really speak from experience on that point. But just for shiggles, I might try the command line option to see if that magically fixes things.

Oh, and by the way, I'm a "she" not a "he"...but I guess you can't really tell that from my avatar...

rwwest7

I think you mentioned something like this, but here's how we do it:
-Ghost the users HD to an image file on a server
-Take out old hard drive
-Put in new hard drive
-Ghost image back onto laptop w/new hard drive
-Boot laptop

Why are they making things so complicated for you? Just sounds crazy.

rwwest7

I just re-read the original post and am now really confused. You wipe out the MBR of a blank hard drive, then clone a good hard drive to the blank one? I thought when you cloned the drive over it also copied over the MBR. You're doing disk to disk correct? Not partition to partition. Just doesn't add up. What happens if you try to boot the newly cloned drive without doing the Vista repair steps?

skrpune

rwwest7 wrote: »

I just re-read the original post and am now really confused. You wipe out the MBR of a blank hard drive, then clone a good hard drive to the blank one? I thought when you cloned the drive over it also copied over the MBR. You're doing disk to disk correct? Not partition to partition. Just doesn't add up. What happens if you try to boot the newly cloned drive without doing the Vista repair steps?

Haven't tried that yet...but to be honest, while I'm curious, I'm not curious enough to be willing to waste another hour+ on trying another ghost to try it out! And yes, I'm doing a disk to disk ghost, not partition to partition.

But yes, we take a spare hard drive (that may not necessarily be blank) and wipe the mbr & then ghost over the user's drive to the spare drive. Then use the Vista cd to "repair" the ghosted drive to be sure it boots, then we put the user's original HD back in the normal HD bay, then into the ultrabay adapter we put another HD that has ghost 8 and all the master images, and then we ghost over the clean master image to the user's original HD to give them a clean install...then do Windows updates (the images are a few weeks to a few months to a couple years old) and some settings changes for hidden folders and IE/Media Player options (which I would have thought would be part of the ready to go image - maybe I don't get it, but isn't that the point of imaging?), then we put the ghosted drive into the ultrabay adapter & drag over the user's data back to the original hard drive. Complicated enough for ya?!

WanBoy67

It's best to ghost to a drive than an image especially when that ghost is an ICE backup drive. I have lost one or two users data COMPLETELY because the image file taken ended up corrupt - on the second occasion even after I had verified it. For normal ghost deployment, file images are the way to go, but when dealing with user data/OS definitely use a drive.

rwwest7

WanBoy67 wrote: »

It's best to ghost to a drive than an image especially when that ghost is an ICE backup drive. I have lost one or two users data COMPLETELY because the image file taken ended up corrupt - on the second occasion even after I had verified it. For normal ghost deployment, file images are the way to go, but when dealing with user data/OS definitely use a drive.

I see your point, but if Ghost is being used just for a data backup then why bother getting it to boot. Just plug it in, verify the data and move on.

And I would bet the "Boot from Vista cd and repair" step is actually what's causing the boot problem. If your doing a disk to disk clone then the MBR is copied, no need for any repairing.

WanBoy67

rwwest7 wrote: »

I see your point, but if Ghost is being used just for a data backup then why bother getting it to boot. Just plug it in, verify the data and move on.

And I would bet the "Boot from Vista cd and repair" step is actually what's causing the boot problem. If your doing a disk to disk clone then the MBR is copied, no need for any repairing.

Depends what's on that hard drive and for whom. If it's someone important and your ass is on the line I'm going to make sure the ICE clone boots so I can swap it quickly. If it's non-important just take a FAST/Easy Transfer profile backup, re-image and transfer the profile back. This can go arse-ways also. It's best to move Documents out first to keep the profile image small, and if it does go arse-ways those documents aren't locked up in an image. You can extract them if that profile image gets corrupt but it's not fun.

I've cloned a disk to disk and the cloned disk refused to boot, don't know why, it was an exact copy after all. Did a repair and it fixed it. Likewise a repeat weeks or months later and it didn't work. Imaging can be frustrating sometimes, there are so many variables MBR, SATA drivers, BIOSs, NTFS versions, profiles, images, corruption. Any one could be a PITA and it's sometimes hard to track it down. Even worse when it's real important data or person and it needs to be done quick and then you hit a problem. I would hate to do it full-time day-in day-out, but I've done my fair-share of it.

genXrcist

Can I make a quick suggestion? After Gdisk <drive #> /mbr is done, format the drive with NTFS. I don't know if this will work but this is where I'm coming from.

When I was at Symantec, we used Ghost v's 8-11 to image our machines and the weird thing I noticed was that when I got a HDD from the factory with just an initial, low level format I could image it but on the first boot it just sat there at a black screen with a blinking cursor, just like your describing. I would re-image it with the same image and voila, worked. The difference is that the drive had been formatted at the file level.

If you can see the files during the ghost process, the image is probably fine but to be sure you can run an integrity check on the *.gho file from the Ghost32.exe app. If it comes up ok, I'd be willing to bet a format prior to pushing the image to the Drive would work for you.

Good luck!

rwwest7

WanBoy67 wrote: »

I've cloned a disk to disk and the cloned disk refused to boot, don't know why, it was an exact copy after all. Did a repair and it fixed it. Likewise a repeat weeks or months later and it didn't work. Imaging can be frustrating sometimes, there are so many variables MBR, SATA drivers, BIOSs, NTFS versions, profiles, images, corruption. Any one could be a PITA and it's sometimes hard to track it down. Even worse when it's real important data or person and it needs to be done quick and then you hit a problem. I would hate to do it full-time day-in day-out, but I've done my fair-share of it.

Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've cloned hundreds of computers, all kinds of different makes and models, and as long as the Ghostcast session finishes 100% I've never had any kind of boot problems. Only problems I've ever had are finding NIC drivers and the SATA issues with older versions of Ghost.

My money is on the Vista repair causing the problem. Hopefully she'll update us tomorrow with a success story.

skrpune

genXrcist wrote: »

Can I make a quick suggestion? After Gdisk <drive #> /mbr is done, format the drive with NTFS. I don't know if this will work but this is where I'm coming from.

When I was at Symantec, we used Ghost v's 8-11 to image our machines and the weird thing I noticed was that when I got a HDD from the factory with just an initial, low level format I could image it but on the first boot it just sat there at a black screen with a blinking cursor, just like your describing. I would re-image it with the same image and voila, worked. The difference is that the drive had been formatted at the file level.

If you can see the files during the ghost process, the image is probably fine but to be sure you can run an integrity check on the *.gho file from the Ghost32.exe app. If it comes up ok, I'd be willing to bet a format prior to pushing the image to the Drive would work for you.

Good luck!

Oh sweet jebus, it's good to hear that I'm not the only one who's seen that blinking cursor! It's nice to know that at least I'm not alone and that it may not be ME per se that's causing the problems.

I'm not sure I am going to do another ghosting this in this case (like I said earlier I'd like to just cut my losses and not spend another couple hours ghosting & reimaging if I can help it), but for future cases, I'd like to figure out a better way to do this process so that I don't end up wanting to stab myself in the eye out of frustration.

Now please forgive this semi-noob-ish question...what would be my best & quickest option to format the hard drive after the gdisk command to wipe the mbr? In the past, I've just ripped open a desktop & hooked up laptop drives with adapters & formatted that way using Disk Management or the like, but that's not exactly seen as the kosher way to go where I work now. Any preferred tools or boot disks that have formatting tools? I do have an Ultimate Boot CD & I think also a BartPE disk at work, but not handy and I haven't monkeyed around with them enough yet to know offhand what's on them, so recommendations on clean & pretty ways to format the ghost destination HD (and by "clean and pretty" I mean not involving me ripping open my desktop and raising too many eyebrows) after the mbr wipe would be greatly appreciated. My goal is to remove the bloat from these procedures and make it so it's more streamlined and less frustrating and quicker, so suggestions are welcome.

Oh, and I'll be sure to report back tomorrow with an update on what happened. The last email I got from my boss is that he still wants to try to do the full backup and reimaging from scratch (including Windows Updates & settings changes) and transfer back of data, but I'm not sure he's read all the notes on this and not sure if he realizes how long it will take to transfer back what's probably about 50GB+ of data (100GB HD, 11GB free = GOBS of user data/files) and then cross-reference it with the data that's on the HD the user has, and then transfer back the new files or files he's changed since last week. Sigh.

genXrcist

skrpune wrote: »

Oh sweet jebus, it's good to hear that I'm not the only one who's seen that blinking cursor! It's nice to know that at least I'm not alone and that it may not be ME per se that's causing the problems.

I'm not sure I am going to do another ghosting this in this case (like I said earlier I'd like to just cut my losses and not spend another couple hours ghosting & reimaging if I can help it), but for future cases, I'd like to figure out a better way to do this process so that I don't end up wanting to stab myself in the eye out of frustration.

Now please forgive this semi-noob-ish question...what would be my best & quickest option to format the hard drive after the gdisk command to wipe the mbr? In the past, I've just ripped open a desktop & hooked up laptop drives with adapters & formatted that way using Disk Management or the like, but that's not exactly seen as the kosher way to go where I work now. Any preferred tools or boot disks that have formatting tools? I do have an Ultimate Boot CD & I think also a BartPE disk at work, but not handy and I haven't monkeyed around with them enough yet to know offhand what's on them, so recommendations on clean & pretty ways to format the ghost destination HD (and by "clean and pretty" I mean not involving me ripping open my desktop and raising too many eyebrows) after the mbr wipe would be greatly appreciated. My goal is to remove the bloat from these procedures and make it so it's more streamlined and less frustrating and quicker, so suggestions are welcome.

Oh, and I'll be sure to report back tomorrow with an update on what happened. The last email I got from my boss is that he still wants to try to do the full backup and reimaging from scratch (including Windows Updates & settings changes) and transfer back of data, but I'm not sure he's read all the notes on this and not sure if he realizes how long it will take to transfer back what's probably about 50GB+ of data (100GB HD, 11GB free = GOBS of user data/files) and then cross-reference it with the data that's on the HD the user has, and then transfer back the new files or files he's changed since last week. Sigh.

Use a tool like the Bytecc-300 which is a USB to EIDE/SATA adapter. You hook up the Spare HDD that has had it's MBR blown away to the corresponding interface (SATA since you said it's a T60P) and then plug the power cord into the adapter itself. Then plug the cable into a PC and when the drive shows up it will say something like "this Disk has an invalid signature" or something of that ilk. Click yes past the error and then go to Disk mgr or a command prompt and format the newly assigned drive letter.

If you don't have something like that, boot to the BartPE disk (which runs in RAM) and then open the command prompt utility. Format away!

This all being said, I was thinking about why they have you do the whole 'Gdisk /mbr' thing. All that command does is re-write the MBR and erase the Disk signature. After you push the image onto the Spare, Ghost will attempt to write a new Disk Signature so everything should work...unless this is Vista? Is that the case? Vista can be sensitive when it comes to Ghosting and the disk signature?

If it's Vista, try pushing the Ghost image using the -fdsp switch, which you should be able to find under Options.

Let us know how it works out!

Super99

I've had that problem before too.
I found that sometimes its better to do a check disk before you use ghost.
Give it a shot.

skrpune

alrighty, so after talking it through with my boss & checking to make sure that the non-booting ghosted actually DOES have all the user's data, we're going to stop trying to get the ghosted drive to boot. There's no use. We'll just adjust the procedure for the future and we'll proceed with what makes sense here, which is figuring out a timely way to get the user back their original HD and their data and get this ticket closed.

I also found an updated image (from April) for this model, so right now I'm reimaging the user's original HD with a fresh image and then I'll transfer back ONLY the non-duplicate data off the ghosted backup. I've also done a search for all new files on the drive the student's had for the last week, and thankfully it's just some emails & one or two other files so I'll just have to transfer over his PST file & a couple others and then I can call this hellish process done.

Keep those fingers crossed folks...and thanks so much for all the great input and advice!!

skrpune

UPDATE: halle-frickin-lujah, I closed out this ticket and the customer is done and happy! The reimaging of his original HD went well, the data transfer went well, and the customer is happy that his laptop no longer takes four days to do a simple task. YAY! Turns out that when the hard drive was originally worked on last week, the duplicates were accidentally made by the tech who was working on the file transfer & ghosting...so the user never really had a ton of duplicates to begin with, and he's got a much faster machine now. It was SO nice to see him walk out of the office with a big ol' smile on his face.

And in talking with my boss, we're going to work on developing our own methods of servicing the students' computers and we'll likely step away from the four-billion step method that I described above.

I was swamped with other users today so I didn't have a chance to test out any of the other excellent suggestions from folks, but in the coming days/weeks I'll test out some of those methods so I can have some alternates and maybe work them into our new, improved, streamlined methods for down the road.

Thanks again to all!