Hard Drive Won't Boot After Ghost - Help!!!

when you did your ghost image, did you do it from a boot cd?
also, what is the partitioning of your original drive?  

what you need to do is boot from the xp cd, use the recovery console and the option ,,, fix boot or fixboot , you may be asked by the recovery console to enter your administrators password.

How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654/en-us
Password Recovery
http://www.petenetlive.com/Tech/Windows/WinGen/passwordrecovery.htm

probably because Ghost had corrupted the partition table and/or boot records at the beginning of your hard drive. try to repair the MBR using the recovery disc and inspect the partition table and cylinder information to see what had happened.

you may want to mount the disk on another system to inspect its starting area. you can probably replace the corrupt MBR with the one that comes with the Windows Recovery Disk or installation disk, and probably ablle to recover the most part of the partition table also.

Ghost has this problem many systems, including one of my systems. each time I install Ghost on the Windows partition it wiped out the entire partition table and replaced the MBR with a DOS MBR (that comes with the disk?). I'm not sure why, but it is probably because the disk was not prepared by a MS-DOS program (may be prepared by one of those disk manufacturer programs) and has a different type of record structure as Windows. I used non-Windows/non-DOS tools to create the disk so had booted into another system and recovered that "Ghosted" system for a few times before I had realized Ghost doesn't like anything non-DOS-alike. so now your only choice might have to be booting into another OS and fix the MBR first. as for the recovery console thing, if you can boot into another OS and doesn't mind corrupting your user data, just delete the password file (SAM) and you can access the system again (I don't recommend that).

Hitachi is good. I have a few Toshiba as well. if the Welcome Screen comes up it means your system has been fixed, but cannot find the right files to run (that is, your backup is probably a bad one, possibly because some files are in use and could not be copied, or simply denied access for its own reasons, if you backup the system when it's active). the drive model shouldn't be a problem, but Windows might hang if the end of the drive has unformatted spaces (the extra space from the old one to the new one). but I still suspect that was because Ghost did not backup the files properly, especially when running inside Windows. Ghost 9.0 and 10.0 for Windows both have this problem with many computers as well!!! the only "solution" was to dump it and use a more reliable backup program. sorry, I can't help with that since you already Ghosted both. but if you can boot into a third system and repair the first one (the old one) to make it boot properly, and then shut down and do a drive sector copying (the CD that comes with a retail hard drive contains such programs) onto the new drive. the extra spaces will be notified if you can boot after copying, and you can reformat them from the computer manager. those are all hints I could possibly offer. meanwhile I never trusted Ghost since version 9.

did you check if the partition is set to active? you can use FDISK to do it.

Are you preparing (fdisk, format) the laptop HD in another machine? If so, this may be the problem. Less risk for problems if the entire install process is run in the correct machine.
/RID

I think that a real reset of the drive can be achieved by doing a zero-fill. Then use the tools from the O/S you want to use to prepare the drive (partitioning, formatting) and install, while the drive is in the machine it will be used in. Never had any problems with that approach. Moving the drive between different controllers (enclosures, computers) *may* cause weird problems.
/RID

Boot from a Dos 6.22 disk with the appropriate version of FDISK on the floppy.
Then run the command FDISK /MBR

We have used this many times when ghosting images over, and it seems to solve the issue.

A zero-fill can be run from a bootable floppy that has the HD manufacturers' tools on it, or from the Ultimate Boot CD, using some wipe utility. Basically, it is all about flushing all the old partitioning information and the MBR. Once these areas are cleaned out, the drive is "as new". There used to be a small program called "zap" (from IBM, I think) that could be used for this.

A thorough zero-fill is sometimes called a "low-level format", which it isn't, but the idea is to write zeroes (or whatever value) into the entire storage area. Sometimes this cures bad sectors and other logical errors on a HD. It doesn't cure physical errors, of course, but file systems errors and such can sometimes be remedied with such an operation where a normal "format" doesn't work.
/RID