NTNBower
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Clone Acronis 8.0 Ghost 7.0 Windows NT4.0
I have a puzzler (for me anyhow). I was using Acronis 8.0 to clone a Windows NT 4.0 Workstaiton (SP6a). I created an Image file of the harddrive, and stored it away for safe keeping on a CDROM. As time went on, the users supervisor requested that I build a second PC (as a spare) for the original, so I built an equivalent PC (exact same PC MFG - identical MB/RAM/NIC/SCSI ctrl etc...) - we actually had many of these older PC's, so it was not that hard a task to do. Then I restored the Acronis image I had created some time ago, and I attempted to boot the computer.
At boot up all I got was:
A disk read error has occurred, insert ...
So I thought I had a bad hard drive or something, and I tried restoring to a second drive with the Acronis image. Same results so now I started to panic a little and began to think Acronis was not all I heard it was cracked up to be.
I was trying to determine if the problem was with the MBR or the Partition itself and found a nifty way to build a bootable NT floppy (by putting ntldr, and some other files on floppy). When I did this, and tried booting from the floppy to the restored hard drive, everything worked like gangbusters. No problems, on either drive. So I figured something must be wrong with the boot, or the cloned process/image I was restoring. I waited until the user had some down time, and I tried cloning the drive to another drive (not using an image) with Acronis.
Same thing, could not boot the newly created drive. So I figured it must be a bad drive I am cloning, or Acronis is not up to the task, so I tried Ghost 7.0. After the Ghost 7.0 Disk to Disk, I did not get the boot message "A disk ..." I just got a blinking cursor, but if I used the boot floppy, it works like gangbusters again!. So it appears that Acronis & Ghost are both doing the same thing, but my question to you experts is:
I now have three hard drives all restored from images either Ghost or Acronis, that when I boot them I get:
1) A blinking cursor on the Ghost restore
2) "A disk read ..." on the two Acronis restores
All three of which can be used with the hardware if I use the boot floppy to boot from. Is there any way I can fix these drives to boot correctly? or am I going to have build a new drive that can be cloned?
If there is an answer to this question - e.g. it can be fixed and the expert provides the steps, they will get the total points & possibly a bonus. If the answer is I have to rebuild, I will split the points across all users that respond to this post.
Thanks in advance for any inputs.
At boot up all I got was:
A disk read error has occurred, insert ...
So I thought I had a bad hard drive or something, and I tried restoring to a second drive with the Acronis image. Same results so now I started to panic a little and began to think Acronis was not all I heard it was cracked up to be.
I was trying to determine if the problem was with the MBR or the Partition itself and found a nifty way to build a bootable NT floppy (by putting ntldr, and some other files on floppy). When I did this, and tried booting from the floppy to the restored hard drive, everything worked like gangbusters. No problems, on either drive. So I figured something must be wrong with the boot, or the cloned process/image I was restoring. I waited until the user had some down time, and I tried cloning the drive to another drive (not using an image) with Acronis.
Same thing, could not boot the newly created drive. So I figured it must be a bad drive I am cloning, or Acronis is not up to the task, so I tried Ghost 7.0. After the Ghost 7.0 Disk to Disk, I did not get the boot message "A disk ..." I just got a blinking cursor, but if I used the boot floppy, it works like gangbusters again!. So it appears that Acronis & Ghost are both doing the same thing, but my question to you experts is:
I now have three hard drives all restored from images either Ghost or Acronis, that when I boot them I get:
1) A blinking cursor on the Ghost restore
2) "A disk read ..." on the two Acronis restores
All three of which can be used with the hardware if I use the boot floppy to boot from. Is there any way I can fix these drives to boot correctly? or am I going to have build a new drive that can be cloned?
If there is an answer to this question - e.g. it can be fixed and the expert provides the steps, they will get the total points & possibly a bonus. If the answer is I have to rebuild, I will split the points across all users that respond to this post.
Thanks in advance for any inputs.
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ASKER
Punky: Cloneing or trying to create an Image of the original drive (w Ghost 7 or Acronis 8) produce the same results as the last three drives.
ScratchyBoy: Ok folks, here is one that says it cannot be done (after my recent experience - I might tend to agree). The only thing I would disagree with is that I know I have seen it work before. Now I know computers are supposed to be pretty predictable, however I found NT be just outside the norm in that sense - it gets finiky for many things. And as for the hardware, these are identical PC's, same make and model MB, case, NIC, Video, SCSI etc. The one and only real diffence is thae harddrives themselves.
As I said I am tending to agree with ScratchBoy, but we will let this ride for a little longe and see if we get any other suggestions.
ScratchyBoy: Ok folks, here is one that says it cannot be done (after my recent experience - I might tend to agree). The only thing I would disagree with is that I know I have seen it work before. Now I know computers are supposed to be pretty predictable, however I found NT be just outside the norm in that sense - it gets finiky for many things. And as for the hardware, these are identical PC's, same make and model MB, case, NIC, Video, SCSI etc. The one and only real diffence is thae harddrives themselves.
As I said I am tending to agree with ScratchBoy, but we will let this ride for a little longe and see if we get any other suggestions.
I agree with ScratchBoy as well, but I had successfully ghosted NT 4.0 sp6a once before by using newer version you have there, but my case is differ since the cloned hard drive used on same system.
ASKER
Well I guess this has been out there long enough. I am gogin to accept that MS Windows NT cannot be cloned very well - or that is does work intermittently. I will split the points out as I stated originally.
Thanks,
Thanks,
ASKER