Why won't Ghost 10 Recovery CD boot a Dell OptiPlex 745

[Brian_Jenkins]

I've read through the forums and found some slightly related items, but none have helped me solve my problem. I have 90 Dell OptiPlex 745 desktop pc's with 1 GB RAM, and an 80 GB SATA hard drive (I've read SATA should NOT be a problem). I've created a restore point successfully on an external hard drive (Maxtor 250 GB). Now I'm trying to boot up another pc from the recovery CD to copy the data to the new pc, but it stalls at a blue screen with the mouse pointer and nothing else.

I've disabled the onboard NIC and even tried disabling the Dual Core processor and using only the single core. Nothing has fixed the problem. I've allowed the pc to sit for up to 2 hours with no further results.

I know this is a hardware issue because I can boot up my Dell laptop with the cd and also an older Dell desktop. Something specific to the OptiPlex 745 is causing this issue.

Has anyone had this same problem, and if so, did you get it fixed, and if so, how did you do it?

[Dwight_Vance]

I have had issues with PCs booting up from the Ghost 10 Recovery CD and the LiveState Server CD. Mostly not seeing the internal or external drives. The Ghost 9 CD seems to work fine in most cases for the recovery of both Ghost10 and LiveState images.

[Ben_Roberts]

Can you boot any of the other Opti's from that CD?

Do your Optiplexs use a RAID array?

Does the unit POST?

Do you get a beep code?

Many Dell machines have diagnostic lights. If any are lit look up the sequence at support.dell.com or give the 800 number a call.

OR

Try removing every hardware component you can...take out things like the NIC, soundcard, and modem, anything that's not needed to boot up (leave the optical drive, RAM, and video card. You might even try removing all but one stick of RAM. If it will boot up after that then reinsert one component at a time to find the culprit.

[Brian_Jenkins]

Thanks for the feedback, but I've tried all of that except using only one stick of RAM. I suspected an IRQ conflict from what I'd read in other parts of the forums earlier and I disabled not only the NIC, but also the serial ports and most USB ports. Nothing worked to get the PC to boot up from the CD though.

Ghost 9 worked slightly better, but it would fry the MFT once it started booting up... If I used the -ai switch to copy the 80 Gig disk block by block it worked, but it took 6 hours to make the image, and another 6 to copy it to the new drive... Not something that will work for me...

As a last resort I tried another piece of imaging software (Acronis), and it worked like a charm on the first try (10 minutes to create the image, and 19 to image a new computer). I've spent a week trying to get Ghost 10 to work, but seeing these results compels me (my boss is also compelling me to get moving on this).

[Tim_Braun]

Depending on the version of Ghost, you need to have working DOS Device Drivers for the optical drive to read data from the CD/DVD media. However, new Dell computers now come with SATA optical drives, and the usual drivers may not work. And I haven't found working SATA device drivers for DOS yet.

There is a work around with some models of Dell Computers. Go in to the BIOS, Drives section, and change the SATA setting from Normal to Legacy. This forces the optical drive to act as an IDE drive, and the your Boot Disk should work. It worked from us on our 745 Towers and USFF systems.

[LSU0736]

How can I get a copy of Ghost 9.0 boot CD?  I have also had problems getting my backup image to recognize or see the the ghost 9.0 image that it created.  It will only recognize gho files.  If you can help send it to phaney1@hotmail.com