Oh Boy, Norton Ghost has Messed up my pc

[SS UK]

Hi all.

I really could use some help. Please!

I posted a week or so ago but it's been so long without progress that I considered I should re-post. Hope that's ok.

Here goes. I have an HP pc with windows xp pro and sata hard drive.

The original drive is sata 0 and I added another hard drive to sata 1. Then I loaded Norton Ghost 2003 because I wanted to clone the hard drive so that in the event of a mechanical hard drive failure with my main hard drive I would have another drive to resort to.

The system picked up the 2nd hard drive ok and I initalised it using the xp disk management tool and formatted it NTFS. Then I loaded Ghost and told it that I wanted to clone the original disk to the 2nd. So far so good. Ghost told me that it needed to add some id tags to the hard drives so I allowed this and then it said that it need to restart and boot from the ghost cd into DO to carry out the clone.

However when it tried to start an internal stack overflow occured and since then I have not been able to boot.

I booted with the xp cd and went into repair console and I noticed that Ghost had added a partition to my existing hard drive on sata 1 which had become C: and my windows installation had moved to D:

I used repair console to delete the new Ghost partition so now I just have the one partition again and windows is there ok as I can log onto the installation using the repair console.

However my pc won't boot from the hard drive and I've tried fixboot and fixmbr and they have not worked. I know there is nothing wrong with the rest of my pc such as motherboard etc as if I put a fresh sata drive in sata 0 slot it will load windows ok in a new install situation but I have loads of programs loaded on my original hard drive and want to make it boot again if possible.

I feel that Ghost has somehow messed with my boot sector and/or boot.ini and this is the problem but I'm not au fait enough with these kinds of things to be able to resolve the problem.

Is there a utility I can use to boot from cd or floppy and somehow make the drive bootable again?

What do you think could have gone wrong?

Of course I'm presuming that Ghost has caused this problem but I guess it could be coincidence and that hard drive has simply failed but I dont think so as it checks out ok if I run chkdsk.

One strange thing I have noticed though is that when I boot from the windows xp cd and run repair console I can't seem to get to the root of my hard drive at the prompt by typing cd\

It says that access is denied

Maybe this is normal, I'm sorry but I'm not familiar with the commands available.

Can anybody please help?

This has really annoyed me just before xmas.

Hope to hear something positive.

Gavin

[Train]

Problem is there i to much in the mr and you should have made and used the Rescue floppy that Ghost would have made for you.

I would save what I would not want to lose on the old drive.


Enter HP model and model number here.

You should be able to find how to get the recovery cd for your computer. I have a feeling you will need it to get the OS straightened out.

[Goalie16]

Thought i was the only one this happened to.. It happened on my work PC.. I couldn't find anyway to remove the partition that Ghost made of my C:\.. Like it overwrote anything XP boot related..

Hate to say it.. but I ended up re-imaging...

Sorry!
tim

[SS UK]

Hi Train.

I have all the cds that came with the pc as it's fairly new and I'm the one and only owner straight from the shop.

Would the recovery cd be amongst those?

If so how shall I proceed?

[SS UK]

Would editing the boot.ini file do any good?

Could this be the problem?

If so how do I do this?

[SuperSparks]

Please could you post your Boot.ini file (it's a hidden file in the root folder of C: ). You may have to set your Folder Options to "Show hidden files and folders", and then uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" before you can see it.

[SS UK]

This is the wierdest thing.

I made a bootable floppy by copying boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect from a working xp pro pc and booted my non working pc with the floppy and it boots into windows.

So I renamed those three files on the hard drive and copied those from the floppy back to the hard drive but it still wont boot from the hard drive, only from the floppy

What's going wrong?

[SuperSparks]

A corrupted boot sector is the most likely explanation, but you say you've tried Fixboot, which should put that right. Now that you've copied those files from floppy, it wouldn't do any harm to go to the Recovery Console and run Fixboot again.

[Nanceel0]

SS UK,
I don't know if you've fixed the problem, but I have some notes regarding Ghost and SATA drives (a Dell) and the second note mentions the internal stack overflow. (I've read of too many problems so never attempted to use Ghost.)
Here's the info (quoted from another forum):

"I decided to get rid of that diagonstic partition. Restored the XP partition to a new hard drive and then got an error upon reboot. I ended up booting to the Recovery Console off the XP cd and deleted the boot.ini and created a new one:

Boot from your CD and follow the directions to start Recovery Console. Then:

Attrib -H -R -S C:\Boot.ini
DEL C:\Boot.ini
BootCfg /Rebuild
Fixboot

note: between BootCfg /Rebuild and fixboot:

a. When you receive a message that is similar to the following message, press Y:
Total Identified Windows Installs: 1

[1] C:\Windows
Add installation to boot list? (Yes/No/All)
b. You receive a message that is similar to the following message:
Enter Load Identifier
This is the name of the operating system. When you receive this message, type the name of your operating system, and then press ENTER. This is either Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition.
c. You receive a message that is similar to the following:
Enter OS Load options
When you receive this message, type /noexecute=OptIn /fastdetect
and then press ENTER.
Type exit and press enter. Your computer restarts."
~~~~~~~
This one mentions the error you received:

"Ghost 2003 came up to the first screen, no text, an odd sized hourglass, and stalled. Several tries all met with the same results. However, sometimes it said “Internal stack overflow. System halted.” And other times it just stopped.
~~~~~~~~
By chance, do you have a Serial ATA drive(s) installed on your system? Your symptoms are "classic"...
If not, ignore the following. But if you do:
(1) Make sure you've updated Ghost 2003 fully using LiveUpdate. Then
(2) Edit the autoexec.bat file of the boot CD or floppy. To the ghost.exe line add the following command: -NOIDE If that doesn't work, change the aforementioned command to -FNI Insert a space after "ghost.exe" before typing either of those commands.
~~~~~~~

You nailed it. I do, indeed, have a serial ATA drive installed. It is being used as a data drive and is easily copied. The system drive is a parallel ATA. If I turn off the SATA in BIOS Ghost runs and I can image my system disk. Not the handiest of methods but it does work. Many thanks!
~~~~~~~~~

Glad to have helped. No need to turn off the SATA though, as long as Ghost is fully updated one of the commands I mentioned should do the trick (if not, you can always fall back on your method).

Alternatively, initiate the Ghost backup from within Windows. In Ghost's Windows interface, select "additional commands" and try, in turn, -NOIDE and then (if unsuccessful) -FNI. Sorry I can't point you to the exact area for that (I've since upgraded to TrueImage) but you should find it without much trouble.

If you add one of those commands and it works you can make a new Ghost boot disk and it will be automatically included. Below is the text from autoexec.bat in my Ghost 03's boot floppy, which is where it is placed. Note that while -NOIDE seems to imply you have no IDE devices, I do and it still worked. For me, -FNI did not work.

@echo off
SET TZ=GHO+06:00
MOUSE.COM
echo Loading...
CD GHOST
GHOST.EXE -NOIDE
~~~~~~

Thank you again. I didn’t try the –NOIDE command since I had an IDE installed (figures!). However, it works like a champ. Much easier than having to disable the drive! Your help is greatly appreciated."

I hope some of this helps. I am also pm'ing you with some other information.

Sincerely, Nanceel0

[nakadina]

Ghost 2003 cloning worked just fine for me for over 3 years (on Win2K Server + Pentium 4 + 1GB Ram ) when suddenly started to give this "Internal Stacks Overflow" Error...

After Googling this problem for couple of times:

+ reading:
ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...2003_guide.pdf

I used command switch: -FNI or -NOIDE (both worked)
Just to pass the Stacks error and see Ghost work slowly slowly at 90Mb per Minute rate...

So I started to suspect something may be wrong in my BIOS settings.

After looking in My BIOS settings & Enabling PCI IDE Busmastering
Ghost finally works OK.

So My recommendation, Check your BIOS - PCI IDE Busmastering is required for fast Disk operation in DOS mode and seems like GHOST 2003 is crashing when its OFF - WINK WINK to Symantec - Fix this with a hotfix or something...

[Train]

That mabe true, but please note the thread was storted December 20th, 2005.. I think the problem has been sorted by now.