Help me with FAT16 ghost probs

[John Prophet]

Ok, I have a customers comp with a 2g drive...totally filled up...she also has a 6g drive as D: drive.

She just got the comp used...has no disks etc...basically there seems to be nothing of value on the D drive so I want to ghost the C: over to the D: drive.

The C: has WinME on it which I assume was an upgrade ( I see in add/remove progs the option to remove ME)



Anyway, it just happens to be FAT16

Why is this always such an issue when ghosting????

Did I miss it somewhere that ghost doesnt work on FAT16 stuff?

I do notice (and in the past also) that when ghosting from a fat16 drive there is some sort of extra "button" or long tab bar with a "1" on it on the ghost screen under where it list the source and destination drives....it looks like you can click it but I dont see it doing anything when I click it.

First I tried ghosting it to a 8g drive....it seemed to do just fine..when I went to boot it said it couldnt find vmouse..then it had a registry error etc.

So I figured it was a fat16 trying to do the 8g partition problem...so I made a 2.1g partition on another drive and ghosted to that...well it starts to boot and just goes to a blank black screen...wont boot in safe mode either.

The ghost process itself seems to work fine but then it has boot issues.

I already tried fdisk/mbr.

Any ideas or workarounds?

What if I ghosted to an image instead and then restoreed from the image to the 6g drive? Would that do anything different?

I was hoping to be able to ghost it to a 2g drive and then try to convert THAT ghosted drive to fat32..and THEN ghost to the 6g drive. I am chicken to try converting the real drive if I dont have a ghosted backup etc.

I have ghost and partition magic at my disposal....how can I work this out?



Thanks, JP

[John Prophet]

OK, is it because of the 2g limitation? So I need to ghost to something a little under 2g maybe?

The drive Im ghosting from is like 2012Mb. Maybe Ill try ghosting to 1995Mb or so.

JP

[Wizzard~Of~Ozz]

If you have partition magic, why not upgrade the C drive to Fat32, then take an image of it? (I trust it more then Windows Fat32 converter)

Then you can restore the image to any drive you choose.

Also make sure you run Scandisk with a surface scan of the HD, it might just have some important files on a flakey part of the drive. Also back up partition to image, not drive to image.

[John Prophet]

Well, I said I was chicken to convert the drive to fat32 without FIRST having a ghosted copy..which so far I havent been able to make.

But I deleted some stuff off the drive and now am going to try to ghost it to a 1950mb partition to make sure Im not going over fat16s limits..then Ill convert the GHOSTED drive, lol..if it works Ill ghost IT to the 6g drive, lol..gets confusing.

JP

[John Prophet]

Ok, LOOKS like that will work...no extra buttons or stuff in ghost..and this time it is showing the TARGET partition as fat16 also. A good sign.

JP

[John Prophet]

hehe, ghosted fine, now when it goes to boot off the ghosted drive it says "invalid boot disk" lol.

Prolly cuz I had to use "partition to partition"

Grrrhh.

Fun to work on outdated stuff.

JP