PCA Forums

ive been trying to transfer my laptop hard drive to one i recently bought. when i restore the image all the drive has on it is some folders named stuff like #$%$% *&&^^&^^& and the files and volume label are the same way. using ghost 2003. and trying to move a hitachi 20 gb to a hitachi 30 gb.

You using the burner on the lappy to do this? Or did you hook the HDs up in another computer using adapters to transfer them directly?

Usually when you see gibberish files like that it means that the hard drive is not setup or connected properly.

How are you doing this? Are you copying directly from one drive to another on a desktop using a mini IDE to IDE adapter? Keep in mind that the laptop drive MUST be setup as a MASTER so you need to put it on the second IDE port. Disconnect any other drives on that ribbon.

If you're restoring from an image file, are you sure the image is good? If it is you should be able to see what's in the image using the Norton Ghost Explorer app.

i am using a mini hdd adapter and i do have it set as a slave on the primary hdd controller. what is the reason a laptop hdd must be a master? that is most likely the problem though. it did start and stop during the image making process.

I've had nothing but problems with ghost 2003. Norton ghost 6.x seems to be the version where they got everything right.

Trust me, long experience, laptop drives work best as Masters and when they're connected by themselves on a ribbon. Some drives just don't work properly on desktop controllers any other way.

Also, those adapters sometimes don't make a proper connection. Make sure you see the model of the laptop properly displayed when the desktop autodetects the hard drive - if there's gibberish characters in the name then you have a bad connection.

Originally posted by JD
I've had nothing but problems with ghost 2003. Norton ghost 6.x seems to be the version where they got everything right.

JD - what kinds of problem were you having with Ghost 2003? The reason I'm asking because that is the version I'm running. What is version 6.x of Ghost?

6.x is the corporate version. I also prefer the corporate version, but the regular version works fine.

i tried your suggestion FP but to no avail. it does the same thing as it did before with the hdd on the secondary master. the drive's model was displayed properly and everything. it has a weird service partition and 243 mb of unpartitioned space. i gave up that route now though. i reinstalled windows with my disk and everything works except 1 thing and its driving me insane. the laptop has an ultrabay 2000, a hot swappable cd rom, battery, dvd drive bay. it will not hot swap, i pull the drive it freezes. i do have the driver loaded but it has an x through it. it detects what drive is in it but no swapping. its on windows 98.