Hi!
I love to use Norton Ghost. Setting up a new system in just a few minutes and I can't live without it. Now from time to time I have this disaster problem that happends. Screen goes blue and fails when booting up again. ntldr is missing or something.
Recently I actually started to believe that Emergency Repair Disk should help but when this was needed at most I got this corrupted data error message. Even when i had my Windows 2000 Adv Srv installation disk available.
Shouldn't this take care of this problems. Well it is most important to backup the data and I had no problem with this before. Just install a new Window 2000 on a fat16 drive. Now back to the problem when I had this blue screen I thought that I wait for the memory dump to finish to 100 % (didn't do that before) and maybe the system doesnt get angry and I can boot up again. Right?... Wrong! System goes furious. I couldnt boot up to Windows 2000. I couldn't boot to DOS from a floppy and the same time have access to my fat16 partition HD. First turned the power off and on (cold start) and I could se that the system found all the HDs but when this happend I couldn't boot up to a floppy it just suddenly stopped and the cursor was blinking. Nothing happend. Then when I did a reset (warm start) I could only se CD-Drives but not the HD's.
I solved this 2 days later with disable one of my drives and I could access floppy and HD at the same time. Now I could install a fresh Windows 2000 system. When I did this it found the old system and for fun I thought why not try to test the repair option witch I was 99 % sure should not work because I couldn't repair with Emergency Repair disk. I did this repair and to my suprise I actually worked more or less. Still it asked for a bunch of files witch I didn't want to install because I was going to do a Ghost extraction later.
After pressing buttons hundreds of times I had a pretty good working Windows 2000 without drivers for CD-Burners or NVIDIA drivers for the graphic card. SqlServer 2000 service was running fine so the registry was parsed as it should. The only problem was that partition labels was shifted. My H: Drive Was G: and so on so I thought it is better to do a Ghost after backup of my files.
Now before I installed a new operating system on C: and I had my old corrupted system on E:, I had no problem with locked files. Ok now I did and as you know selecting all files and copy them to a backup device is not a good idea because when you copy several gigs and it suddenly stops because of a single locked file that will not help you very much. I tried to seach for a good freeware program (because I wanted to have one quickly and without andy limitations) to do the backup. I tested one and it did a backup but 100 of MB was missing for some reason. I didn't want to make a single backup file of all files and that leaves you with a very few options. I tried to do a XCOPY batch file but this copied only a few MB's and then stopped for some reason. Then I tried the last and working thing and this was using a WinZip like program (PowerArchiver or Ultimate Zip, both installed on my system). Ok I got this one file but then I unpacked this file to my backup device and only a few MBs was missing. Usually the locked files are not so important to backup so I left them alone.
So all this happends frome time to time for some reason. I believe this has to do with overlapped partitions wich I don't know much about.
Now the questions:
1. Do you have some advice of the text above that would help in the future ?
I did alot of searches of disk recovery software and there are a few to test.
2. Do you know a software that could help me with this problem.
I stumbled on this freeware program wich does not seam to be supported any more called 'System Safe Gold'. Did a system important file backup and the tried there DOS based program to do a test recover. Guess what problem I come up with. It coudn't write NTFS but when you read about it it says that it support Windows 2000.
3. Are there any similar program like System Safe that could help me with NTFS support of course :-)
4. Do you have any solution to partition overlapping if you suspect it like I do ?
Best regards
Andla
