Clarification of Question by
littledrummerboy-ga
on
26 Sep 2004 19:19 PDT
Yes, ghosting, in this case, means Symantec Ghost V8.0 (Enterprise
Edition). The operation being performed is simply to copy the system
disk from one hard drive to another hard drive (both ATA/100). The
target hard drive is larger than the source drive (this being the
reason for doing the copy), but the partition sizes are not being
changed during copy. The source drive contains 4 basic partitions, the
first being FAT, the 2nd NTFS, the 3rd NTFS, and the 4th FAT32. I do
this kind of operation frequently for two purposes, the first being to
have a backup copy of the system drive (on a spare hard drive), and
the second (on occassion) being to move the system disk to a larger
drive. I don't trust Ghost to change the size of partitions, so I
always ghost a drive without changing partition sizes, then move
partitions later if necessary.
So I have done this many times, and I have never used sysprep because
nothing in the hardware configuration is changing. The target computer
is the same as the source computer, the SID is not changing and the
configuration is not changing. In doing this operation probably 50
times on various systems, this is the 2nd time in my life that I have
seen Windows do this nasty trick. The ghosted system appears to be
perfectly normal, but I cannot log into Windows 2000 on the ghosted
drive. If the ghosted drive has another operating system on it (e.g.,
Windows Me), I can log into that one fine. It's something about what
Windows 2000 does when it is fetching the user profile or settings, or
checking for new hardware (which, in this case, there is not because
the hardware is exactly the same on the target as on the source, save
for the physical disk that is the system drive). If Windows were doing
something nasty like checking the serial number of the system drive, I
could understand. But I would still be unable to understand why this
operation works 98% of the time, and fails in such a nasty and
miserable way on occasion (only on the occasions when I need the most
for it to work correctly, of course).
I have re-ghosted this system several times onto different hard drives
to try to eliminate this problem, but only proven that (as they say)
insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different
result. BTW, I always run chkdsk on all partitions on the source drive
before ghosting.
