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#1
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Operating System not found
I am trying to use a "ghosted" backup hard drive. I get the message
"Operating System not found". This "ghosted" drive is from my main master C: boot drive which worked just fine. Do I have to run Windows Setup again on this drive? How can I run Windows Setup and keep all my settings and software on the drive? I ran Windows Setup from the Windows 98 Startup disk once before and lost access to much of my software and personal settings on a drive. Can anyone help me? |
#2
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How was the image 'ghosted'? How was the disk prepared before the image was
'ghosted'? What does the imaging software say about using a 'ghosted' image with a boot disk? Why are you trying to boot this image? If the machine is not the same one where Windows was originally installed you will have a lot of difficulty getting Widows to run. If you didn't create this disk on the machine where you are trying to run it then you might not even get the machine to read the disk at all. -- Jeff Richards MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User) "Greg Clift" wrote in message news I am trying to use a "ghosted" backup hard drive. I get the message "Operating System not found". This "ghosted" drive is from my main master C: boot drive which worked just fine. Do I have to run Windows Setup again on this drive? How can I run Windows Setup and keep all my settings and software on the drive? I ran Windows Setup from the Windows 98 Startup disk once before and lost access to much of my software and personal settings on a drive. Can anyone help me? |
#3
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Greg Clift wrote:
I am trying to use a "ghosted" backup hard drive. I get the message "Operating System not found". You probably didn't use Ghost correctly to create an exact copy. This might help: Boot from a floppy that has FDISK.exe on it. To create a boot floppy, go to another computer with win-98 and put in a blank floppy and open a DOS window. In the window, type this: "sys a:". Then find fdisk.exe and put a copy of it on the floppy. Once you boot this floppy on the computer with the problem, run fdisk at the dos prompt. If it asks you about large drive support, answer yes. You will then get a menu of 4 or 5 things you can do. One of them is to set the bootable partition or active partition (sorry, I'm going by memory here). Most likely your drive isin't set correctly to have an active partition. Once it's set, you should be able to boot from it (assuming Ghost did everything else correctly). |
#4
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"ghosted" hard drive can mean one of two things. An image file(s) were
created when copying the entire hard drives partition, and restored to another hard drive. OR, the hard drive is a copied version where imaging was not utilized in the copy. If you didn't move the hard drive to another PC, go to the last paragraph. There may be problems moving a hard drive from one PC to another PC. This usually manifests itself when first accessed. Files and folders may be not in the anticipated location. This is especially important with operating system boot files (symptom of your message). When moving an image file from one PC to another PC, it should be in some univeral format like on CD or DVD in iso 8660 format. This is commonly used format used by commercial CDs for PCs. From that media, the image of the hard drive should be restored to an onboard hard drive. That hard drive should be in the PC you intend it to operate in. A COPIED hard drive, using whether ghost or some other hard drive copying application, will make the copied hard drive suitable to work in the PC its located in at the time. But, sometimes puts the boot files in the wrong location. But, the hard drives FAT is usually correct and the filesystem is still accessible. Reinstalling windows on this hard drive in the same PC should do no harm to personal files. Usually, all that is needed is to have the system boot files in the proper location of the boot sector of the boot partition. This is done with a boot floppy using a small program called sys.com which is an ms-dos file. This is a common malady when copying a hard drive. A restored image has much better success. "Greg Clift" wrote in message news I am trying to use a "ghosted" backup hard drive. I get the message "Operating System not found". This "ghosted" drive is from my main master C: boot drive which worked just fine. Do I have to run Windows Setup again on this drive? How can I run Windows Setup and keep all my settings and software on the drive? I ran Windows Setup from the Windows 98 Startup disk once before and lost access to much of my software and personal settings on a drive. Can anyone help me? |
#5
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"98 Guy" wrote in message ...
Greg Clift wrote: Boot from a floppy that has FDISK.exe on it. . . . Once you boot this floppy on the computer with the problem, run fdisk at the dos prompt. If it asks you about large drive support, answer yes. You will then get a menu of 4 or 5 things you can do. One of them is to set the bootable partition or active partition (sorry, I'm going by memory here). Most likely your drive isin't set correctly to have an active partition. This is not a reliable description or prescription. (It omits essential FORMAT and 0S installation or SYS routines.) You will find good advice at http://home.satx.rr.com/badour/html/partitions.html -- Don Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) |
#6
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Don Phillipson wrote:
set the bootable partition or active partition This is not a reliable description or prescription. (It omits essential FORMAT and 0S installation or SYS routines.) If the drive hasn't been formatted or partitioned then when he runs FDISK there will be no partitions he can set active. That in and of itself is a useful thing to know and will tell him what he should do next. It doesn't take much time to do, and it won't break anything by doing it. If he can't find any startable partitions on the drive then telling him to format and sys his drive is not what he's going to want to do, given that it will wipe out what-ever ghost image may be on the drive. Actually, if he boots from a floppy, then tries to access the drive (by switching to C he'll find out right away if there is a useable partition or not. If he gets the message "ivalid drive specification" then he'll know there's something wrong with the drive's formatting. In that case, I'd hook the drive up as a slave in another computer (a computer with Norton) and run NDD. Norton will usually detect "invisible" drives and make changes so that they become useable. |
#7
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Yes, thanks alot for your help. The drive was ghosted by Norton Ghost. I
ghosted my main C: drive to my extra D: drive so that I would have a backup should my C: drive fail. Well, it happened. My C: drive messed up somehow. So I just figured that, OK, I would just change out drives and have everything like it was originally. Well, the ghosted drive looks like it has all the files on it from the original master drive. It is readable as a slave drive, but it won't boot like the original drive booted every day. I thought that a ghosted drive was supposed to work just like the original. I am using the drive in the same computer as the original. Thanks for any help you can offer. "Lil' Dave" wrote: "ghosted" hard drive can mean one of two things. An image file(s) were created when copying the entire hard drives partition, and restored to another hard drive. OR, the hard drive is a copied version where imaging was not utilized in the copy. If you didn't move the hard drive to another PC, go to the last paragraph. There may be problems moving a hard drive from one PC to another PC. This usually manifests itself when first accessed. Files and folders may be not in the anticipated location. This is especially important with operating system boot files (symptom of your message). When moving an image file from one PC to another PC, it should be in some univeral format like on CD or DVD in iso 8660 format. This is commonly used format used by commercial CDs for PCs. From that media, the image of the hard drive should be restored to an onboard hard drive. That hard drive should be in the PC you intend it to operate in. A COPIED hard drive, using whether ghost or some other hard drive copying application, will make the copied hard drive suitable to work in the PC its located in at the time. But, sometimes puts the boot files in the wrong location. But, the hard drives FAT is usually correct and the filesystem is still accessible. Reinstalling windows on this hard drive in the same PC should do no harm to personal files. Usually, all that is needed is to have the system boot files in the proper location of the boot sector of the boot partition. This is done with a boot floppy using a small program called sys.com which is an ms-dos file. This is a common malady when copying a hard drive. A restored image has much better success. "Greg Clift" wrote in message news I am trying to use a "ghosted" backup hard drive. I get the message "Operating System not found". This "ghosted" drive is from my main master C: boot drive which worked just fine. Do I have to run Windows Setup again on this drive? How can I run Windows Setup and keep all my settings and software on the drive? I ran Windows Setup from the Windows 98 Startup disk once before and lost access to much of my software and personal settings on a drive. Can anyone help me? |
#8
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Make sure the boot partition is set to "active". FDISK (or PartitionMagic,
others) can check/do this. "Greg Clift" wrote in message ... Yes, thanks alot for your help. The drive was ghosted by Norton Ghost. I ghosted my main C: drive to my extra D: drive so that I would have a backup should my C: drive fail. Well, it happened. My C: drive messed up somehow. So I just figured that, OK, I would just change out drives and have everything like it was originally. Well, the ghosted drive looks like it has all the files on it from the original master drive. It is readable as a slave drive, but it won't boot like the original drive booted every day. I thought that a ghosted drive was supposed to work just like the original. I am using the drive in the same computer as the original. Thanks for any help you can offer. "Lil' Dave" wrote: "ghosted" hard drive can mean one of two things. An image file(s) were created when copying the entire hard drives partition, and restored to another hard drive. OR, the hard drive is a copied version where imaging was not utilized in the copy. If you didn't move the hard drive to another PC, go to the last paragraph. There may be problems moving a hard drive from one PC to another PC. This usually manifests itself when first accessed. Files and folders may be not in the anticipated location. This is especially important with operating system boot files (symptom of your message). When moving an image file from one PC to another PC, it should be in some univeral format like on CD or DVD in iso 8660 format. This is commonly used format used by commercial CDs for PCs. From that media, the image of the hard drive should be restored to an onboard hard drive. That hard drive should be in the PC you intend it to operate in. A COPIED hard drive, using whether ghost or some other hard drive copying application, will make the copied hard drive suitable to work in the PC its located in at the time. But, sometimes puts the boot files in the wrong location. But, the hard drives FAT is usually correct and the filesystem is still accessible. Reinstalling windows on this hard drive in the same PC should do no harm to personal files. Usually, all that is needed is to have the system boot files in the proper location of the boot sector of the boot partition. This is done with a boot floppy using a small program called sys.com which is an ms-dos file. This is a common malady when copying a hard drive. A restored image has much better success. "Greg Clift" wrote in message news I am trying to use a "ghosted" backup hard drive. I get the message "Operating System not found". This "ghosted" drive is from my main master C: boot drive which worked just fine. Do I have to run Windows Setup again on this drive? How can I run Windows Setup and keep all my settings and software on the drive? I ran Windows Setup from the Windows 98 Startup disk once before and lost access to much of my software and personal settings on a drive. Can anyone help me? |
#9
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mdp wrote:
Make sure the boot partition is set to "active". FDISK (or PartitionMagic, others) can check/do this. That's what I told him in the third post in this thread. Then others jumped all over my plan. Turns out I was right. Ghost must have done a partition copy - not a drive-to-drive copy. The partition is not set to active. If the OP wants to boot from the second parition on a 2-partition drive - that's something I've never tried to do. Theoretically you'd have to remove the "active partition" setting on the first partition (drive C) and give it to the second partition (drive d). Does FDISK give you the ability to remove the "active partition" setting? I know it won't let you set more than 1 partition as active on a system. I recommend that the user buy a second hard drive and slave it into the system and do a ghost copy from D to the new drive, then remove the first drive (and set the new drive as primary master) and boot from a floppy with FDISK and use FDISK to set the new drive's partition as active. Then it should be bootable. |
#10
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That's the thing about newsgroups, sometimes you're the pigeon, sometimes
you're the statue. Partition Magic can do just about anything (I want to do) with partitions such as booting from a partition that's not the first partition. I'm not sure if FDISK can but I think so. I use Ghost to copy partitions, not drives, all the time. If I need to set a partition active, I do so as another step. That way I don't need to back up an entire drive which today can be quite large. "98 Guy" wrote in message ... mdp wrote: Make sure the boot partition is set to "active". FDISK (or PartitionMagic, others) can check/do this. That's what I told him in the third post in this thread. Then others jumped all over my plan. Turns out I was right. Ghost must have done a partition copy - not a drive-to-drive copy. The partition is not set to active. If the OP wants to boot from the second parition on a 2-partition drive - that's something I've never tried to do. Theoretically you'd have to remove the "active partition" setting on the first partition (drive C) and give it to the second partition (drive d). Does FDISK give you the ability to remove the "active partition" setting? I know it won't let you set more than 1 partition as active on a system. I recommend that the user buy a second hard drive and slave it into the system and do a ghost copy from D to the new drive, then remove the first drive (and set the new drive as primary master) and boot from a floppy with FDISK and use FDISK to set the new drive's partition as active. Then it should be bootable. |
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