Ghost 10 sucks for drive cloning.... 33

Thanks, Tim.

Helpful and interesting read. Not to be rock-headed about the matter, but I had to have a solution and quickly. I'll certainly acknowledge most of the distinctions and conditions you have pointed out that Ghost (and some other imagine-cloning utilities) require. Further, I've posted that my brother had success using CasperXP, so I could certainly recommend that others at least try it for their specific needs.

I ended up sticking with CompuApps DriveWizard. Free 30-day trial for those who want to see if it works for them before they buy it. I've used it for over 2 years on many of my machines here at home with success. It's not lovey. My version will not work with network drives, though the Pro version allegedly will. It's a great product and for me it's predictable and reliable. Not a lot of bells and whistles.

Even with DW, however, I could create errors on the "new OS" disk when I used the DW "mirror" function. I suspect those errors were due to many of the same reasons you've listed below. The method I've used with DW that works with *NO* subsequent drive disconnection is the "drive upgrade" function. I've enclosed a link to a screen shot below. By using this method, one is still overwriting all data on the destination disk, but for some reason both disks remain bootable when connected individually. I won't attempt to speculate as to why this is, but only say that it is a method that has worked for me on both Dell and non-Dell systems I have.

ctl-alt-v-print screen wouldn't have captured both DW dialogue boxes, since only one was active ).

Now that I've actually completed the job with the machine in question (a Dimension 5150 w-dual SATA 80gb WDs), I'm taking some time to learn what I could've done better.

I have a couple of extra machines with dual disks sitting around. In fairness to Ghost 10, I'm going to see if I can figure out (with the help of some excellent suggestions in this thread) where I was boinking everything up. It's always more fun to crash machines when there's no customer data at risk:)

Thanks again.

Stew