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Hal Selvey
December 13th 03, 12:22 AM
Please reply to . unless the message is
long. If long, I have a broadband connection at
.

System: eMachines S1940, FID AM37 motherboard, Athlon XP
1900+, 40gb WD hard drive (C:), 6.4gb Maxtor HD (D:), on-
board video, eMachines OEM CD burner, Iomega CD burner/DVD
Windows XP (service pack 1 not installed, but several
updates done.)

After cloning my hard drive (as a backup method) I began
having problems with Windows XP. I could not boot from
either drive alone. I might mention that though Norton
Ghost warned against booting with both hard drives
connected after a cloning operation, it went ahead and
initiated a reboot while I wasn't watching.

The biggest immediate problem is that the BIOS (SMART)is
reporting imminent D: drive failure.

Naturally, eMachines is no help.

Is there any way to get Windows booting of the C: drive
again?

The following is my email to Symantec describing the
problem and their reply.

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Hi Hal,

Welcome to Symantec's Technical Support Forums.

>After a couple of weeks, I decided to go ahead and
install SP1. I
>re-cloned the drive. That's when the problems started!
The computer
>wouldn't boot unless both hard drives were installed.

Hal, this would indicate that the computer was booted
with both
bootable drives installed and powered up.....something
that is
expressly warned against in the document that explains
how to perform
a Disk clone.

>I also noticed at least some of my shortcuts pointed to
the D; drive.
> I suspected Windows was booting from the D: drive.

From what you have described above, this is probably true.

>I decided to bite the bullet and run the restore cd. I
disconnected
>the D; drive and booted to a DOS prompt (on the restore
CD) and found
>out fdisk couldn't identify any hard drives. I then
tried a restore.
> The program reported it couldn't find GHOSTERR.TXT. I
clicked OK
>and the restore program immediately reported success
(it's a 20
>minute job. Needless to say, nothing had happened.
Apparently the
>restore uses some version of Ghost for the restore
process.

Since you used the Restore CD provided by EMachines, I
would suggest
that you contact them for assistance with this issue.
Symantec does
not provide support for versions of Ghost that computer
vendors
purchase and use to create their Restore CD's.

>Eventually I got it booting again (both drives
connected) (I don't
>know why it started working again.) The BIOS continues
to report
>imminent failure of the D: drive. I started snooping
around the
>system.

Again, this would indicate that a dependency has been
established
between the two drives. You may be in a situation where
it is
necessary to wipe both drives and start from scratch.
However, you
would naturally lose all of your personal data if you
were to decide
to do this.

>Could this be causing my problems?
>Is there a way to change the Volume ID back to what it's
supposed to
>be? Is this a "feature" of WinXP to prevent piracy?
The Microsoft
>link says they don't have any information on the problem
(they never
>seem to help).

The problem occurred when the computer was booted with
both harddrives
in the computer at the same time. There is nothing we can
do at this
point, as Windows has changed volume ID's and now thinks
that both
harddrives are required for your machine to boot.

I would suggest that you start by wiping the second
harddrive and try
cloning the drive again, this time using the steps as
outlined in the
following document:

Title: 'How to perform a Disk to Disk clone'
Document ID: 2001032917165825
> Web URL:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/20010
32917165825&src=w

Keep in mind that I am unable to determine if the
original source
drive will boot without the second drive installed, so
you may not be
able to boot the original drive at all.

Before you proceed, make sure that you copy out all
important data
like jpegs, video files, MP3's, Word documents, etc. If
you wipe the
second drive and are unable to boot from the original
drive, you will
be at a point where you will want to get out your XP CD
and all
application CD's to reinstall from scratch.

Please let us know if you need additional assistance with
Ghost.

Regards,

Stephen May
Symantec Online Technical Support



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