Having Trouble Ghosting with -IB

[vostok4]

I am trying to Ghost using Ghost 8.0 here at work, I have both drives (SATA) hooked up straight to another system, I am starting ghost with ghost.exe -ib, and cloning from a 80gB 5400RPM drive to a 100gB 7200RPM drive. When I put the new drive back, I just get a flashing cursor on a black screen with no booting. The laptop recognizes the new HDD because I can run the diagnostics on it in the BIOS, but it won't boot off of it. I've read the posts here, and I made sure to use -ib.

Anyone have any ideas what could be wrong?

[vostok4]

I should have mentioned this drive doesn't have the recovery partition. When I was installing Windows 2003 I formatted the drive completely and only have one NTFS partition on it.

*edit* oh and I tried R&R 3.1 and it says Error in MBR data. Possibly not a Lenovo MBR, so exiting. R&R 4.0 just failed.

Le sigh.

[vostok4]

Ugh crap I see that I need to clone the drive IN the Thinkpad. Lovely. I don't have an enclosure for SATA Sucks that I need to buy one just for the clone.

[Ken Fox]

Ugh crap I see that I need to clone the drive IN the Thinkpad. Lovely. I don't have an enclosure for SATA Sucks that I need to buy one just for the clone.

Whatever issues may exist for cloning PATA thinkpad drives out of a thinkpad (and I personally have never experienced these issues even though I have read about them here), they do NOT exist with SATA drives. So, you don't need to do it in a thinkpad.

IF you get a flashing cursor and that is all, just use the IBM MBR repair program, the link to which you can find all over this board by using the search function. If you are concerned it won't work given that you have no service partition, then you can use the MBR repair utility present in a Windows XP disk, if you have one, under "repair console." It is a command line function, and I don't remember the exact syntax, but have read instructions for using it in posts on this board so some searching here, or elsewhere with google, will find the command line you need to type in. I'm sure there are places on the web where you can download a freeware program that will do the same thing, just do a little google searching and you'll find it.

[vostok4]

I tried the IBM MBR repair program and it didn't work, so now I will try to find a Windows XP disk and repair that way. Thanks for the advice, I'll let you know how it goes.

[vostok4]

Grml, I don't have my 2K3 CD on me, and I can't find a free utility to do it in the meantime. Do you have any recollection of what the free utility was called?

[Ken Fox]

Grml, I don't have my 2K3 CD on me, and I can't find a free utility to do it in the meantime. Do you have any recollection of what the free utility was called?

I have never seen such a free utility, specifically for windows. There are, however, other freeware utilities for multiboot and linux systems. I'm sure that if you spend a few minutes googling you can find something. All you want is for the MBR to direct the laptop to go to the Windows partition to startup. You could presumably install the Windows version of the MBR later, over whatever you can find on the web.

[vostok4]

OK I found a 2K3 CD in the lab, and I tried both fixmbr and fixboot. Neither of them worked! I still have this [censored] flashing cursor... I will try to find a SATA enclosure I guess, or maybe Ghostcasting the drives.

[vostok4]

OK, built a ghost diskette and I'm going to Ghostcast because I don't have an enclosure handy. Hopefully this works!

[deeastman]

Info in this thread may help you.

Thinkpad forum thread

and

Fixmbr
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058