Won't stop booting to PC DOS

[Steven Sutton]

I am working on and older PC with Ghost 2003. I know, but it's an old computer. In the Ghost program in Windows, I selected what I wanted to image. The computer then rebooted into PC DOS but never fully launched Ghost. Now the computer will NOT boot back to Windows. 2 questions - How do I get it to boot back to Windows (and selcting "Skip Ghost DOS and boot into Windows doean't work) and 2nd question, I have previously Ghosted boot drive I can use but I am scared it will try to boot to PC DOS as well. Is the "Boot to DOS" iset in the BIOS or something on the drive? Can I use the other boot disk without a problem?

Thank you all so much. This is a ral important computer and I need to get it running again as soon as I can.

[Edward Tippelt]

Is Ghost installed on the hard disk of your machine?  
Booting to DOS is not a bios setting, but a boot partition or boot manager setting.

You did not mention what version of Windows you are running, so all I can really suggest is to boot the machine to DOS or WinPE using an external diskette ideally, and then set the windows partition as the active partition using any suitable DOS utility, or WinPE's diskpart utility.

You can run Ghost 2003 from a bootable WinPE disk running WinPE 2 and above, which means you don't need Ghost on the target machine and therefore less risk of stuffing it up.

There are other issues relating to the age of the hardware you are trying to run it on. For example, if your system has SATA disks then PCDOS is highly unlikely to be able to read them, as DOS does not understand SATA and equally does not understand large hard disks. At that point, bios settings for hard disk "compatibility mode" may need to be enabled.  However, its much better to use WinPE and add any necessary SATA drivers to it than to risk messing up with DOS.

So the next step for you is to accurately define the version of windows and the hardware in the disk area. Once we know your setup in more detail we are more likely to be able to help you.

There are other limitations that Ghost 2003 will have; it will not understand 4K sectoring on modern large hard disks.  Ultimately you should really consider updating to a modern version of a disk management tool. Ghost is still available although more suited to corporate environments, but tools such as Paragon Partition Manager are ideal for one off use, and contain inbuilt functionality to create bootable CD's/DVDs/USB Keys running WinPE and the partition manager toolset. All you need to do is to download the (Free) Windows ADK, and install the Win PE tools to default locations, then install partition manager and point it at the ADK. You can then build your boot media.

[Steven Sutton]

Thank you for the very thorough reply. I will confess to being a bit flustered when I made the original posting, hence all the typos. :-O

Yes, I had Ghost 2003 installed on the internal hard drive. The computer in question is running Windows 2003 Server R2 SP2. The drives are all SATA and happen to all be 160 GB in size.

I pulled the drive that had the PC DOS partion on it and deleted the PC DOS partition but I still can't boot from that drive. It sounds like you are suggesting I can "fix" this drive (aka - make it bootable again) using an appropriate DOS utility (and that would be..?) or WinPE's disk part utility. Sounds like I need to be looking into WinPE for several reasons.

It also sounds like I can use WinPE to make a boot disk, install the SATA drivers and finally install Ghost 2003 to be able to clone my existing drive and/or restore from a previous disk image I have on external (USB) disk drive.

Thank you so much for the assistance!

[Steven Sutton]

From reading EdT's post, I am gathering that even if I made a DOS boot disk for Ghost 2003, I would not be able to Ghost my SATA drives because DOS doesn't have the tools to understand SATA drives. Is that correct? I have don't some looking at Partition Hard Disk Toolkit and it looks like what you can buy today is good for Windows 7 and up. Doesn't do me any good with a Windows 2003 Server drive. Could someone please share how I can (safely!) clone my existing Windows 2003 Server SATA drive regardless of whether it is with Ghost or another software. As I have mentioned, it is rather important I keep this computer running so having a drive ready to go in case of failure seems critical to me. I just need to know how to do it. Safely. ;-)

Thank you to all who read and help on the forums.

[Steven Sutton]

Just a final follow-up from me, the original poster. When it came to fixing the drive that was the source of this post, I wound up deleting the "PC-DOS" partition which (as many of you would know) did not make the drive go back to booting from the Windows partition. I eventually downloaded Macrium Reflect, installed on another PC and used it to create a "Rescue" disk. Using this Rescue disk I was able to fix the boot problem on the orignal troublesome drive. Whew.

I thank EdT for your post. It set me on the path to fixing my problem.