[dba-Tech] Petulant PC

Steve Erbach erbachs at gmail.com
Sun Jun 3 13:34:51 CDT 2007


Dear Group,

I've used Norton Ghost for a long time as part of Norton SystemWorks.
I use it to do a disk to disk backup of my entire hard disk.

I recently upgraded to the latest version of SystemWorks.  Lo! and
behold! Ghost is no longer included with it!

So I made a bootable diskette with Ghost on it from my wife's copy of
SystemWorks 2003 and I've been using that.

However, every time I run Ghost now I have trouble getting my computer
going again.  The main behavior of the system is that it'll get past
the Windows XP progress bar thingie and up comes the blue-gray
background, just before the login form appears.  At that point, before
the login form appears the system either reboots or shuts down.

The past several times this has happened I've pretty much let it cycle
through umpteen reboots until, finally, it stops rebooting or shutting
itself off and allows me to log in.  Then everything's hunky-dory
until I run Ghost again.

Not this time.  Now I see a new error that the file
C:\Windows\System32\Config\System is either missing or corrupt and
that I should try the Repair option from the Windows XP installation
disk.

So I put in the XP install disk and everything looks like it's going
along nicely; but when the main installation menu appears the system
shuts itself off.  I've tried this numerous times with the same
result. I must be insane then, to expect that something different will
happen if I just start it over again, eh?

I have a 2002 version of Russinovich's ERD Commander.  It gets ALMOST
to the point where it asks me which hard disk to boot from when the
system shuts down.

I've run Spinrite 6 to no effect.  I only used level 2, but I think
I'll try level 4 while I go see Shrek the Third.  That'll take 5 or 6
hours to complete.  Right now I'm running the Ghost Check function on
my C: drive....

Does this ring any bells with anyone?

-- 
Regards,

Steve Erbach
Neenah, WI
http://TheTownCrank.blogspot.com



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