Ghost and FAT question

[stev-rey]

Hi all,
I had a strange occurrence this morning at boot up, Windows hung at splash screen and could not boot to windows. At first I rebooted to Command prompt Only and at the C: prompt used the scandisk /custom command and ran scandisk. Scandisk found a error reading drive and asked to move files. I exited out from that and rebooted with NDD floppy and used diagnose disk util.
Ndd found a bad block and asked to move files and also asked to create an undo file, I set this to create one in an extended partition, and hung during attempts to fix and had to reboot. running NDD again tells me FAT table did not match and must be repaired and I let it do that before it can continue, and when it does, it would hang again on the same attempt to fix that bad block area.

It was acting like a sick drive.

Finally, I went back to Scandisk and let it go to thorough mode.

No bad blocks

??????

When that was done, Windows began to start, but was missing a cache of system files and could not get to my desktop.

Fortunately, I had prepared for unevents like this and had made ghost image of my system into an extended partition of the drive when I first finished configuring my entire system with networking. I simply booted with Ghost floppy and restored Image to C: and all was well.

No errors or bad blocks were found either.

??????

Whatever...

Anyway, I got to wondering, if FAT table got changed, does Image return to original FAT?

How about if one makes an image in FAT 16 and at some point changed to FAT 32, then runs ghost, does it return to FAT 16?




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It's either that or it's into the woodchipper

[Limerick]

Hi Stev-rey,

The answers to the two questions at the conclusion of your post are yes and yes. When you load an image that you have previously created and stored somewhere, the contents of the destination partition (or drive) are zapped, leaving you with the updated FAT of the files contained in the image. Likewise, if you have an image that was created from a drive that was formatted FAT16 when you dumped it and you subsequently load it back to a drive that is formatted FAT32, you'll end up with a FAT16 drive. (This can be overridden via the use of the -F32 switch, which instructs Ghost to lay the image down as it converts to FAT32 "on-the-fly.")

Happy computing!

Limerick

[stev-rey]

Thanks a bundle, Limerick.

It was of great interest to me.

Ghost is a great tool!

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It's either that or it's into the woodchipper

[stev-rey]

Thanks a bundle, Limerick.

It was of great interest to me.

Ghost is a great tool!

------------------

It's either that or it's into the woodchipper

[ReadmeSoft]

Nice one Limerick,
so nice to see there are people that understand ghost, Its such a Godsend of a program, I am running System commander and have four bootable opperating systems, and my Kids have there own Partitions in a menu at startup., they are all primary partitions and fat 32 apart from one which I use for windows 95
and thats fat 16. Cos im an old fart who still likes to play on it sometimes LoL:-}

All the drives I have ghosted to cd. and if I mess up, ghost comes out. and like magic Im
back in a few mins

Whatever was , still is wit the ghost. even the Recycle bin has the same trash in it....
So get system commander Stevrey, Make an identicle partition and if one fails , well Ye always got the over..................

[jtdoom]

Hi,
am I safe in assuming these switches are hidden in the options in the graphical shell as well??

btw, thanks Limerick.
if the menu don't work, the command line would.
I wonder if the conversion would cause restoring an image to take much longer.
(ghost is quite speedy in normal ops.)

in any case, using GHOST would IMHO be a LOT better option than conversion by win98 fat conversion tool.
I have NO idea how long that would take, and how safe windows fat convertor is. (never done it)
But, using a ghost image would have a safeguard built in, since one could go back to orig FAT-SYSTEM if things get botched up.

btw, we have another believer...
in ghosts...


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If what I heard was free advice, would I take it? Jaak

[jtdoom]

about NDD for DOS ( the DOS component of Norton utils in sysworks 1.1 and 2.0 was not changed.)
does it work on networked drives?
I wonder what its limits are.
It's getting outdated perhaps.


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If what I heard was free advice, would I take it? Jaak

[DrMDJ]

jaak,

Re ghost option: There are a lot of commandline options that are not shown in the GUI.

[Limerick]

Hi Friends,

That -f32 switch is in the Options. You can see in this
how to implement its functionality.

Limerick


[This message has been edited by Limerick (edited 03-18-2001).]

[jtdoom]

well,
there is indeed plenty info at Norton's knowledge base
a good starting point for people is this
(poor sobs like me don't yet have enterprise 6.5 ) http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/
been looking there and I tell ya, I gonna have to print the manuals one day.....


other good sources, with good tips on the not so up to date freebies that often came along with mobos. (beside the PDF and readmes on CDrom)
these places are kinda cool to get a layman's understanding...
http://www.gotapex.com/reviews/ghost/
http://radified.com/Ghost/ghost_1.htm

kind regards, Jaak