Trying to Ghost IDE hd to SERIAL hd

mobri09

I have a complete OS ghosted on computer A hardrive(IDE) with Norton Ghost 2005. I want to transfer that image to computer B hardrive(Serial). I want to do this so i dont have to load all my application to the new computer. I did ghost the destination hard drive but it will not boot successful. I cannot figure out why. When it restart it says windows was not properly shutdown/software changes/hardware changes... choose 1 of the following ...safe mode....last known....etc.
I choose normal and it loops back and restarts. Next i booted to the XP cd just to see if it detected the image and it saids C:windows(which is good). I ran chkdisk,fixboot, and fixmbr just incase and still nothing. I tried this twice so far and i even tried the hard drive utilty software to copy 1 drive content to another, but that will not work for me either. So i guess my question is CAN you ghost a hardrive from 1 computer to a totally different computers hard drive. Or does ghost just copy images to the same drive if it crashes or a new drive if installed on same computer.?? Any info would be amazing

JDMurray

A Ghost image of a Windows XP or 2000 can only be successfully used on a machine that is (nearly) identical in hardware and configuration of the machine that the Ghost image was made from. Win2K and WinXP installations are very closely bound to the hardware configuration of the machine. If you try to use a Ghosted OS image on a very different machine (e.g., a different motherboard chipset) you'll have problems because the wrong device drivers are loaded in the image, and some of the registry info will be incorrect as well.

You can try booting in safe mode, uninstalling all devices in device manager, rebooting, and reinstalling all of the correct drivers for the mobo, cards, and peripheral hardware. I've had this work when using the same Ghost image between different flavors of Asus and ECS mobos, but it's hit-and-miss. Most of the time it's just faster and more reliable to do a clean Windows install rather than futzing with a flaky Ghost image installation.

RussS

We do this quite often with several of our clients as they are upgrading to new machines. One of the problems I have is that many of the programs they use are not supplied with installs and to get a disk from the supplier is lie pulling teeth on a chicken. What I do is ghost to the new drive and then boot to the XP CD and choose the 2nd repair - that usually allows the system to refresh any flaky system files and also does a new recognition of hardware and loads the appropriate drivers.

mobri09

Thanks alot JdMurray and RussS for the Info. So i guess i have to install everything again, Is there anything out there that duplicates 1 drive to another?
Life is hard

jasoninaz

Pm me your address and I'll mail a bartcd with bootable serial ata and bootable network connection too.


Call it my christmas present.

Thanks, Jason

TheShadow

the real problem is parallelATA (IDE) to serial ATA. You are trying to use parallel ATA drivers for someones motherboard with another motherboards serial ATA controller. If both system were parallel ATA you would have had better luck. Serial ATA is much closer to SCSI that EIDE is/was .

Webmaster

mobri09 wrote:

So i guess i have to install everything again, Is there anything out there that duplicates 1 drive to another?

If you can get your hands on a copy of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) and a Windows PE, try using Ximage, the new file-based imaging tool from Microsoft. It has many benifits over sector-based imaging such as not being limited to using identical disks/partitions. XImage is a new deployment tool for Windows Vista, but works also for 2000, XP, and 2003.

mobri09

Awesome info guys! I will have to look into all this. Good Thanksgiving break project! Thanks again everyone