Any gurus for compaqs here?

specifically deskpro series PIII 800 i think..

the problem ive had (a few occasions now) is that if i take a ghost of a machine.. and put onto a different disk.. the compaq will not boot it.. any other machine will, but compaqs wont. its causing me a headache as ive ended up having to do fresh installs on a few occasions now.. taking up far too much of my time.

they dont throw an error message, or say boot failure, its just a blank screen with a cursor flashing top left.. O/Ss are anything.. same with NT4, XP and w98

any help or ideas will be appriciated

cheers

Colin

is the partition you are trying to boot from marked as active, what size hd are we talking about?

almost forgot,

what software and version are you using for the ghost? and

is the source image from a larger or smaller harddisk.

Its a straight clone of disk.. i think its got 2 partitions.. one fat16 which is the active boot one for NT4, thats 2gb then another 8gb ntfs extended one.

i think its got a small one for some compaq utils.. not active and its hidden... it should work tho, if i put this drive in a dell it will boot.

almost forgot' date='

what software and version are you using for the ghost? and

is the source image from a larger or smaller harddisk.[/quote']

errm Norton/symantec ghost 2003

the source is from a larger disc, but again.. this has happened every time we try to ghost compaqs.. regardless of disc size

Maybe the bios in the compaq has problems booting from partitions that are outside of a certain boundry. I know you should still be able to download the latest bios versions from the hp website, might be worth trying to update one machine to the latest and see if that solves the problem.

For the NT based OS's (NT/2K/XP/2003) you could try a floppy boot that hands over control to the HD once the initial boot has occured.

Format a floppy on an exisiting workstation that has the required O/S then copy

NTLDR

BOOT.INI

NTDETECT.COM

onto the disk and try and boot from the floppy. its important that the floppy not be formatted on a W9x machine because the necessary NT boot sector wont be written.

Just having a mooch thru google and HP/compaq forums and its a common problem apparently.. tho cant seem to find a solution.

might try ghosting the image back to the compaq instead of on another machine.

well i sorted it..

i cloned the clone... to another disc.. both in the compaq in question.. and it worked... bizzare eh!

well i sorted it..

i cloned the clone... to another disc.. both in the compaq in question.. and it worked... bizzare eh!

When you were originally trying to clone the disk to work in the new compaq, did you do it in the compaq or where you using a ghosting machine?

I remember a while back at my old place of work, that certain types of machines write the mbr in a different place on a disk. Example... Using a dell to disk to disk a compaq image, then putting the hdd in the compaq would result in the o/s not loading. We found that making sure you run ghost in the machine you are uploading the image to sorted this problem