eMachines restore failed... need help!

eeekMachines Restore Disks

I've been trial and erroring different solutions for an eMachines T1100 that came with XP Home preinstalled, ever since sp2.

It's a drag to have to redownload everything whenever it hiccups.

Anyway, after making ISO images of the original disks and extracting what I could, I 've learned that they're .GHO images of the drive as setup by the factory and Norton Ghost 7.0 (maybe a scaled down version) is on the disk.

I think it was freddiereyes.com or some such site where there's an article and file you can download, enabling you to use Ghost to clone your drive to cd's.

I tried it and got a set of 6 cd's that worked twice; on the third use, I started getting a ' Cannot read GHOSTERR.TXT", error message.

I have no manual for using ghost, so I'm kinda lost. Anyone have any suggestions, besides a new computer?

I found that link: http://www.freddyreyes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23

Ghost isn't really hard to use. Basically is is menu driven. You clone 1 drive or partition to another. Is is always best to have a second hard drive or CDs/DVDs to do this. The clone is an exact duplicate of your source. When you clone to another hard drive, you cannot have both hard drives connected at the same time once cloning is done and the program is finished as windows will see "2" hard drives with an OS on them and crash.

Ghost does cloning in a roundabout way. It first creates image files and then do clone, you reverse the process. It is rather slow. Apricon EZ gig is a much better program it does a direct clone. I am sure there are others.

Hey Tedster. Thanks for the reply. The thing that I was after was getting the info to cd's. the original install formats the drive to 1 partition and I haven't learned to change that. The bootdisk at the link above sets ghost to file sizes that will fit on cd.

If your location's for real, the BEST of luck to you.

I was having the exact problem as the original poster.

The solution I found was a modem card I had removed from the computer was causing the computer to hang at the "What's your computer's name?" part of the initial setup.

Putting the modem back into the computer allowed it to get past this part of the setup and finish successfully.

You can GHOST to any device to include a CD.

and yes- my location is real. We gave Saddam a necktie party this morning.

Yes Tedster,
good going on the necktie party! I knew your location was real... who would make that one up??

"Ghost does cloning in a roundabout way. It first creates image files and then do clone, you reverse the process. It is rather slow. Apricon EZ gig is a much better program it does a direct clone. I am sure there are others."

I have used Ghost a few times, but with Emachines older Ghost restore discs, I could never get a complete restore accomplished. Norton 360 a new offering from Symantec, will perform automatic backups and they are easily restored. I have a 100GB USB external Seagate that I use as the backup drive. Seagates DiskWizard will clone most boot drives exactly. I have done this many times as I repair a lot of older computer systems. Drives with XP on them are no exception to this

The eMachine discs will work on a mobo with similar hardware

I tried this out on my spare PC which has an Asus P4B533-VM board. The CDs copied the files, and everything went smoothly. What's funny is that my spare PC now thinks it's an Emachine W2888. The Motherboard has similar hardware to the Intel D845GVSR which is in the W2888. So If your board has similar H/W (e.g. chipset, audio, etc.) try your CDs out.

How to fix the original issue back a few miles ago at the beginning of the thread.

If the system does not have a telephone modem installed, install one. That should clear up the problem. If there's already a modem installed, the problem lies somewhere else in the networking hardware area. There might be a missing driver to a particular networking component. The easiest way to restore the system is to get an XP install CD by itself, without a new COA key, format the hard drive with NTFS (not quick), this is in the windows setup area, proceed with installation, use the COA key on the back of the computer when installing. When the install is completed, go into windows, check the device manager for unknown devices (Start > (right-click) My Computer, select properties... select hardware tab, click device manager. If needed, install drivers, which will usually be located on one of the Emachine restore discs, usually #3. Insert the disc, go to my computer, right-click the CD drive icon that the disc is in, select Explore. Then go into the Drivers folder, there you should see folders to the devices on the system, open these folders, somewhere, there should be a setup file (like a software installation file) Once you get the drivers installed, activate windows over the internet, and you will have a true "clean install of XP