Ghost failed...won't boot

[notionless]

I've used Norton Ghost 2003 numerous times to backup my computer without a problem. This time when the DOS version of Ghost came up, it froze. Rebooting led to the same thing. I tried every way to 'return to windows' and none worked.

I then used WinXP to boot to the recovery console. I used diskpart to delete the ghost partition. Still couldn't boot. I used fixmbr, fixboot and bootcfg to try to get the c: drive to boot. No luck, it still says its a non-system disk. I then used the repair feature of WinXP setup disk. It copied a bunch of files, but still won't recognize the c: drive as a boot disk.

I can see all my data when in the recovery console, so its still there. I just need to make the c: drive bootable again. How can I do this?

Thanks!

 

[FlyingPenguin]

You're saying your boot partition became corrupt while making a backup of it (not restoring it)? That's pretty unusual. Ghost is only reading the partition not writing to it so it's really unlikely to damage the source partition. However anything can happen. I had this happen once on an NT Server box 8 years ago. Only time Ghost ever screwed up on me and I use Ghost daily in my business.

It's possible that the drive just chose that moment to fail or suffer a sector crash. I would suggest you download the drive manufacturer's disk diagnostic utility and run the full (advanced) diagnostic on the drive to see if it passes factory certification. The utility can often fix minor damage as well.

Next you should try running a scandisk on it which you can do from the repair console or from a BartPE boot CD (or you can connect the drive to another computer as a spare and scandisk it).

A real long shot - and fixboot should have fixed this - but maybe the boot partition is no longer the active partition. You can use Partition Magic or even an old Win98 Boot disk and FDISK to make the boot partition active.

Do you have a Ghost image of your boot partition on DVD somewhere so you can restore it? It's really pointless to ghost your boot partition to another partition on the same drive and not keep backups somewhere. I do this on a monthly basis - just the boot and apps partitions, and my data gets backed up up seperately every week. I actually do save the image on a seperate partition on the same drive and then burn that image to a DVD using Nero and archive it (since I use seperate partitions for apps, games & OS I'm only backing up around 7Gb which easily fits into a 4.7Gb DVD since Ghost uses 2:1 data compression).

For future reference you might want to read my article here on disk partitioning for easy Ghost backups:

http://penguinblog.com/partitioning.shtml

Hope this helps...