Thinkpads Forum

I have a new T61 and installed ghost 9 to make an emergency DVD image. No problem. I tired to restore it as if I lost a hard drive. I booted from the Ghost CD and then loaded the DVD as the source, It wouldn;t find the C: drive as a target. I figured out the reason was the C; drive is SATA. The intent of this exercise was to have a restorable image in case I lose the hard drive while out of town. From reading some items it seems I can load more drivers from diskette as part of the boot process. I don;t want to carry a diskette drive and don;t want to upgrade to Ghost 12. Has anyone found a way to reload a SATA drive from scratch with Ghost 9 and no diskettes?

GhostriderTx wrote:I have a new T61 and installed ghost 9 to make an emergency DVD image. No problem. I tired to restore it as if I lost a hard drive. I booted from the Ghost CD and then loaded the DVD as the source, It wouldn;t find the C: drive as a target. I figured out the reason was the C; drive is SATA. The intent of this exercise was to have a restorable image in case I lose the hard drive while out of town. From reading some items it seems I can load more drivers from diskette as part of the boot process. I don;t want to carry a diskette drive and don;t want to upgrade to Ghost 12. Has anyone found a way to reload a SATA drive from scratch with Ghost 9 and no diskettes?

As I recall a while back there was some discussion in this forum about problems when making a full clone of the hard drive (like to upgrade it) when using Ghost and the consensus was that Lenovo's R&R or Acronis were the recommended backup solutions.

I have not used Acronis (but maybe others here have). I tried Lenovo's Rescue and Recovery and I know it works okay from CDs and DVDs.

Try a search for Ghost and Acronis and you should find the threads. Good luck.

Have you tried the restore operation with the BIOS setting for SATA on "Compatibility Mode"?

Acronis True Image Home (now up to version 11) is the current state of the art in disk cloning and back up for individual users, imo. Full featured time limited trial version is available for free download from the company's website. Highly recommend it over an antiquated or even the latest version of Ghost.

When you create the image, you need to make sure that you use the -IB switch in Ghost.

I cannot comment on Ghost but I have lots of experience with Acronis. In the last couple of versions (10 & 11) there were several instances where Acronis completed AND VERIFIED the backup but when it came time to restore, Acronis said the image was corrupt. If you look on the Acronis forum at Wilderssecurity.com you will see many threads about corrupt images not able to be restored. Based on recommendations at Wilderssecurity.com, I switched to ShadowProtect (http://storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectDesktop/) and it has worked flawlessly on many restores.

There is a feature in the Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions of Vista that offers the option to do a "Complete PC Backup" by creating an image of the system. It can be found in the Backup and Restore Center Control Panel. I have not yet used it to create a system image, but was interested in knowing if anyone has and how this compares with Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image.

If you have a Seagate hard drive you are entitled to a free download of DiscWizard from Seagate's website. It is True Image except for the name.

Ed H wrote:. . . In the last couple of versions (10 & 11) there were several instances where Acronis completed AND VERIFIED the backup but when it came time to restore, Acronis said the image was corrupt. . . .

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

GhostriderTx wrote:Has anyone found a way to reload a SATA drive from scratch with Ghost 9 and no diskettes?

Yes, you can integrate the SATA drivers into a Ghost boot cd. I did this for Ghost 10, and described the process here:http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB. ... 094456/0#0

In that post, there's a link to a post by someone who did the same for Ghost 9.

I never liked the way the Ghost boot disk creator worked (haven't played with it since about 2004). Even since the 1998 days (using PowerQuest Drive Image, before later moving on to Ghost (pre-symantec days), I always built my own boot disks (first 1.44Mb floppies and win16 drivers, then later Cd-R iso images with win32 drivers).

It's pretty easy to add mass storage controller drivers (SATA, or SCSI, or RAID) along with NIC drivers into Bart's PE builder to make a bootable CD-R. I use the corporate edition of Ghost Solution Suite (which is configurable as plugin for BartPE) since that is what I had them buy at work. We've been using it work a while with success. I did have trouble with the SATA drivers initially with the Dell Latitude D420/D620 and the equivalent HP nc4400. But once I integrated the updated SATA driver in my BartPE CD-R disc, I was fine. The recent Dell D430/D630s appear to be able to use the same SATA driver. I believe the T61 would behave much the same way.

Can you build a BartPE disc? The instructions on the web are pretty straightforward. (and I'm sure usual proponents for Acronis True Image will also chime in).