Question : Problem: Ghosted (destination) Hard drive: Boots up OK - then restarts the PC!

After a very painfull HDD failure I purchased Ghost 2003 to make a clone of my new hard-drive for back-up purposes.

My operating system is WIndows XP pro
My hard drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80GB ATA/133

I followed very carefully the instructions downloaded from the Symantec website:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/8f7dc138830563c888256c2200662ecd/bed35aa1282fa1a888256a1f0005f646?OpenDocument&src=bar_sch_nam

After successfully performing a disk-to-disk clone, to test, I disconnected the original HDD, configured (jumpered) the clone disk (an identical drive) as master and connected it using the original drive's IDE cable.

When switched on, the PC boots up to the 'Press Ctrl, alt, delete to log in' prompt and allows a log in. I get to see my original desktop.   Trouble is, after about 30 seconds, the PC just re-boots.  It reboots after about 30 seconds whether I have logged in or not.  :(

I don't know if this is significant, but when I attempted to create my Ghost boot disk using MS-DOS,  Ghost complained that the DOS boot disk I created through explorer (in XP) was not an acceptable version of DOS.  I dug out an old  Win98 2E boot disk and tried this, but when aimed at the WIN 98 boot floppy, the Ghost boot disk creation process crashed with a statement that it was unable to write a particular file.  So, Unable to create a Ghost boot disk with MS-DOS, I did the deed with with PC-DOS - and this appeared to work OK.  

I've been at this on-and-off for a couple of days.  Please can anyone tell me what I may have done wrong ??

Answer : Problem: Ghosted (destination) Hard drive: Boots up OK - then restarts the PC!

FJRMill

Can you boot, hit F8 and boot to your desktop in SafeMode and not get re-booted?

If 'yes', you can probably right-click 'My Computer/Properties/Advanced tab/Startup and Recovery/Settings' and un-check 'Automatically restart'.  Re-boot in regular fashion and see if this prevents the auto-reboot.

If the 'cloning' process has not actually been 'successfully' performed, and you are getting some type a system error, and 'Automatically restart' is checked, then you may not be seeing whatever error message might be occuring and so you do not get a chance to see what clues that might offer.

However, sounds like the cloning process did not work correctly.

The proper way to get a MS-DOS Ghost boot disk is to open the Ghost Boot Disk Wizard, click on Standard Ghost Boot Disk, click 'Next' passed Additional Services, and on the DOS Version dialoge box click on 'Get MS-DOS'.  You need to provide either a Win98se or ME boot disk when asked for, and the boot wizard will copy those files to 'C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Ghost\Template\common' so they can be used by the Ghost Boot Wizard to create the MS-DOS boot disk with the correct version of MS-DOS.

You can get Win98se or ME boot disks, if needed, from:

 http://bootdisk.com/

You can get more information on creating Ghost boot disks here:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/8f7dc138830563c888256c2200662ecd/c70580e005eee098882568cb005b0038?

If you do not find information from an error message screen after unchecking the 'Automatically restart' that allows you to correct the problem, you might want to retry the cloning process with the MS-DOS based Ghost boot disk.  If that fails again, then alternatively, it may be successful if you create a Ghost 'disk-to image' file first, and then restore that image to the other HDD using 'image-to disk'.  But this requires having another HDD to store and retrieve the image from, or optical media such as CD or DVD.