Ghost failing to boot / corrupting NTFS?

[ameoba]

I'm having problems with Ghost (the 'enterprise' edition, v8.2). It seems to be mangling my NTFS partitions.

My original drive has 4 partitions -

1) NTFS, 23GB
2) Linux Swap, 1GB
3) Linux EXT2, 5GB
4) FAT32 local storage - the rest

Windows XP SP2 is installed on the NTFS partition. I'm using GRUB as my bootloader.

I'm using the Ghostcast Server to create the image & then send it back out to the clones (after running sysprep). After the image comes back up, GRUB doesn't work but this is an easy fix. The problem is that Windows will not boot. It just sits there.

I've made sure that partition 1 is active & used a win98 bootdisk to fdisk /mbr. It still says "Missing Operating System".

After fixing GRUB, Linux boots just fine. I can mount the NTFS partition & it looks like all my files are there - including boot.ini and ntldr.

Some of the machines have different HDDs (different brand of 40GB) but even the ones with identical drives have the problem.

I've used the exact same procedure to image 2 other labs (30 machines) with different hardware. Is there anything I might be missing that I need to do differently here?

 

[Phoenix86]

Try running fixboot and fdisk/mbr from the XP cd.

 

[ameoba]

I think it's just bad HDDs. Half the machines eventually came back up after re-MBRing them. The ones that didn't were all old Deathstars (but some of the ones that worked were deathstars as well).

I guess I just decided after trying to get 3 of them up with no luck, the rest were all toast, too.