Sanity check on cloning problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doug Gordon
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D

Doug Gordon

I started my usual procedure for the initial setup & config of the XPE
system that I will be cloning (i.e., the FBA stuff). The target PC that I
usually use for this was unavailable, so I took a brand new one out of its
box. This was a completely virgin system with a blank HD.

So to start out, I booted PC-DOS from a special CD and ran Norton Ghost's
"gdisk" utility to configure a set of partitions on the HD. Immediately
after this (no reboot), I ran "bootprep", which succeeded according to its
messages. My next step should have been to reboot, run Ghost, and restore
the partition with my XPE image files and go from there. But when I did
this, the PC would not boot at all -- I don't even get the basic BIOS POST
messages. I've tried about everything I could think of, including using the
CMOS reset jumper in case something in there got corrupted.

Any ideas other than a coincidental early h/w failure? It's odd that it
happened just after I did the disk partitioning and bootprep, but OTOH I
can't think of anything those utilities could have done that would lock the
PC up before it even displays the messages indicating that it's found the
disk. The only other thing I guess I could try is to disconnect the disk to
take it out of the process altogether, but I still can't see how it could be
involved.

So should I get another unit out of storage and try again?

Doug G
 
Doug,

This will unlikely help you but a while ago I worked with some embedded boxes that had a BIOS 'extension' placed in a hidden small
partition at the beginning of the flash card used on the device as main storage. I was lucky to find that out becuase if I cleaned
the partition (and I did that as one of my experiments that time) the BIOS didn't even show POST. Depending on how 'bad' was the
demage in the extension code, I might or might not see some error messages or hear some beeps.

It is easy to find out if there is a hidden partition with diskpart, 3rd party tools like Paragon Partition Manger or Partition
Magic, etc.
 
Just as a follow-up, it looks like I just ran into a hardware failure that
was pure coincidence. It was just that it happened while I was in the middle
of developing a new cloning technique that made me wonder what I might have
done. I took another unit out of storage and set it up successfully. So I
now have a procedure for our production guys that uses a bootable CD-ROM
with Ghost and our system's Ghost image files to automate about 90% of the
work in setting up our units to ship.

Doug G
 
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