Clone disk

[Migration User]

The non-profit I assit has Ghost 11.5 - never yet installed. I need to use ghost.exe to copy from a failing NTSF hard drive to a new NTSF hard drive. The question is: will copying using ghost.exe produce the copied drive as bootable?

[Edward Tippelt]

You don't indicate which operating system you are trying to image, so I would recommend you make sure that you LiveUpdate your install to bring it up to build 11.5.1.2266 as then you are covered for any O/S up to and including Windows 7.

You cannot have two drives in a system that are both marked "Active", so if you are trying to "clone" a hard disk, the sequence is to make a disk or partition image of the source drive to external media, then restore that image to the replacement drive once it has replaced the failing drive.

[Migration User]

Sorry 'bout that - the workstation in question runs XP Pro.

As I mentioned the Ghost has yet to be installed anywhere. The most logical place is the server but that is several doorways and partitions away from the workstation with the failing HD. Since all that I want (or need) is Ghost.exe I must ponder that.

[You cannot have two drives in a system that are both marked "Active", ] That remark puzzles me, as any hard drive must be "active" to be accessed - whether it is bootable or not is a different story altogether. In any case dumping an image to external media poses its own set of problems so If Ghost won't do that then I may have to bite the bullet and get Acronis instead.

[Edward Tippelt]

You can install Ghost onto any suitable platform then create a bootable WinPE image which can be written to optical media (for booting from a CD or DVD) or which can be written to a USB device and booted from there. This gives you the possibility of configuring a USB hard disk as a WinPE bootable device and thus writing the image to the USB disk before replacing the hard disk.

I think you are confusing the term "active" with the term "formatted".  A partition that is bootable, but which does not have the "active" flag set, will not boot.

If you hope to image XP by cloning direct to another drive, and then hope that the replacement drive will boot, you need to check whether the cloning program rewrites the boot.ini unchanged or whether it realigns it with the target drive device number. The latter will definitely prevent a successful boot if the target is then re-homed as the primary drive, unless you edit the boot.ini.

I too have used Acronis to image "difficult" drives, and have always opted to use the external storage approach to hold the image, restoring it to a replacement drive on the same hardware port. This has always worked for me. However, I cannot recall any occasion when a disk to disk clone ever booted successfully for me, except in one instance many years ago where an IDE hard disk controller offered a hardware bit level cloning capability in its bios.  YMMV

[Migration User]

I'm quite familiar with GHOSTed CDs and/or DVDs, but that posed hardware problems which I won't mention.

""A partition that is bootable, but which does not have the "active" flag set, will not boot." Quite correct. However, even the old DOS FDISK will toggle the active flag on an NTFS partition.

In any case, thank you for your time and advice - I certainly appreciate it.