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Originally Posted by Cyrealm
Could I ask you to do that soon. =) I could not get the XP partition that I backed up to and external drive using Ghost 10 to restore correctly using Norton Restore Disk (Ghost 10 CD) =(. After trying several attempts, I just ended up reloading XP. I too encountered the problem booting Ghost 2003 from it's CD.
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Well here I'll give you the basics now and do a detailed step-by-step writeup later:
1. Setup the Boot CD
You will need a full edition of Windows XP Home or Professional, a copy of BartPE, and a copy of the DriveImage XML plugin. The last two are available for free. Here are the links:
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm
Add the DriveImage XML plugin to the config window for BartPE and then have BartPE extract the necessary files from your XP disc (it does it automatically). Burn a CD with the output. You will know that the disc works by either inserting it into your XP machine while running (an overlay program will appear on the Start button) or by rebooting to see if the disc is bootable (if you're doing it on an Intel Mac just hold the Option key at boot and then select the CD).
2. Backup the XP partition
Reboot into the BartPE CD (warning: takes awhile to completely load). Open the DriveImageXML app and click on Backup. You will want to copy your C:\ to whatever you backup drive is (USB or Firewire hard drive). It's actually pretty quick; it did my basic Windows installation in like 10 minutes. You can also backup your main partition while Windows is running, but just for data integrity's sake I like to boot from the CD to ensure that absolutely nothing is running off the C:\.
3. Restore the XP partition
Reboot into the BartPE CD. Open the DriveImageXML app and click on Restore. You will want to restore your backed up image file to the C:\. If you're just overwriting your existing partition, then it's fine, no special requirements are needed. If you're repartitioning your hard drive, then it's a different story...
If you have wiped the XP partition via Boot Camp and repartitioned, the new partition must be EQUAL or LARGER in size than the partition you originally cloned. i.e. if you backed up a 30 gig XP partition and try to restore it to a 20 gig partition, it won't work. It will work if you restore it to a 30 gig or larger partition. If you want to create a master backup that you can use in the future, I'd suggest intially creating a 5 or 10 gig partition, installing Windows/updates/drivers/apps, creating the backup, deleting the partition in Boot Camp, and creating a larger partition more to your liking - this ensures that you can get away with pretty much whatever larger size partition you want to in the future, in case you initially create a 50 gig partition for Windows and later decide you only want it to be 30 gigs.
The next part is formatting. When you create a new partition in Boot Camp, it's not going to be formatted. You will need to format it to either FAT32 or NTFS, whichever you used when you originally installated Windows and backed it up. This is a little tricky. First you will need the original Windows XP installation disc. Make your partition in Boot Camp and restart with the XP CD in the drive. Format the drive to FAT32 or NTFS and when it finishes that and starts copying the Windows files, turn off the computer, restart and eject the XP disc (hold down the right mouse button or CTRL + left mouse button), insert the BartPE disc, restart again to boot from the BartPE, select the BartPE disc as the boot disc by holding down the Option key at boot time, and load your image following the directions above. Now you can successfully restore your image to the freshly-formatted hard drive. It's a bit of a trick but it works, I went through a lot of trial-and-error to ensure that everything was fully functional.
Let me know if you have any questions. I have done this several times and have been 100% successful
