Comments on: Recovering From a Stuck Symantec Ghost Virtual Boot Partition

By: Juan Alcantara

Juan Alcantara — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:15:07 +0000

The /i switch fixed this annoying issue for me. tHANKS Guys!!!!

By: Dharmesh

Dharmesh — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:17:29 +0000

badrah

You’re a genius. Your fix worked for me too. I had to use the /i but in the end all turned out well.

Thanks a ton for posting the fix. Ghost has never done this to me before.

By: mikle

mikle — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:22:14 +0000

thakkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

By: nathan

nathan — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:09:33 +0000

What a life saver the Gdisk commands CHEERS

By: kyle

kyle — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:23:39 +0000

LIFESAVERS!!!!! …… I can’t belive it was that difficult to fix this stupid issue.

try this:
1. boot using Ghost CD to the command prompt
2. go to c: drive (where the virtual drive is)
3. cd ghost
4. >gdisk 1 /act /p:1
5. >gdisk 1 /del /p:2
6. remove any cd or floppy disk then reboot.

with step 4 and 5, if the computer stops responding, try the /i option,
ie.
4. >gdisk 1 /act /p:1 /i
5. >gdisk 1 /del /p:2 /i

hope this helps … it did with my case.

By: Waleed

Waleed — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:03:01 +0000

badrah . Many Thanks for the help , your way helped and fixed the computer in 1 minute !

the option /i worked for me

billion Thanks for your genius solution

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:01:56 +0000

Badrah you da bomb! Like Vincent, I had to use the /i switch but it worked perfectly. A million thanks!!!

By: Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:47:52 +0000

badrah!!!! you are the best! Thank you for the great resolution!!!

this was the key:
4. >gdisk 1 /act /p:1 /i
5. >gdisk 1 /del /p:2 /i

THX

By: Himanshu Verma

Himanshu Verma — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:38:49 +0000

And before I forget, thanks a lot all you guys for saving my day. Had a critical meeting tomorrow a laptop crash would have destroyed my week, who would have thought that an attempt to back up your machine would crash it!! Thanks again

By: Himanshu Verma

Himanshu Verma — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:35:18 +0000

I had a windows 98 bootable recovery CD. I booted through CD drive, found FDISK on that. It fixed my problem! Here is what you need to do. Find any bootable CD that has FDISK on it. Type FDISK, it will display options. Choose the option that displays all partitions. The Ghost Partition will be active. Change the active partition to that of the XP partition, Reboot and relax.

By: Justin

Justin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:35:10 +0000

Thanks for the advice Badrah, worked perfectly!

By: Renato

Renato — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 02:00:13 +0000

DAVE

The hammer with the mouse thing worked….I thank you deeply for saving my XP ass….You are right Ghost sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By: David Nortunen

David Nortunen — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:19:09 +0000

Badrah you are a life saver. I can finally go to bed now. Been working on this problem for the last 5 hours or so. I wasn’t looking forward to telling my wife that my simple Ghost backup of her only work computer managed to screw up her machine. Whew!!!

Thanks man!

By: Abs

Abs — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:53:00 +0000

{Directory has only ghreboot.exe, ghost.exe, gdisk.exe,ghstwalk.exe, ghwrap.exe, gscript.txt, args.txt…and NONE of the executable files work !}

I am going to use the Fdisk on the system tonight, as my hard drive is one 40GB and the other Hard disk whcih is empty at present is 80 GB, i have disconnected all my other SATA drives.

What do i change in fdisk to go back to windows, sorry guys i am not used to ghost 2003 or fdisk,

i dont want to loose any data as i backedup some of my data on the c: drive before this happened. please email me on abduls@inbox.com

i just need to know what should i have to follow on fdisk, or it is something very straight forward.

thanks alot for the threads think i will be able to do it. i hope so fingers crossed…..

By: opuel

opuel — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:25:29 +0000

Thanks Badrah your solution fixed my machine too.. It was crazy
YES!!

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:09:28 +0000

For those reading this later, the best answer I found to my question above is here:

https://forums.symantec.com/syment/board/message?board.id=109&message.id=12845

The best advice I have read on how to create a boot disk recovering from this Ghost problem is here.

http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/steroids.html

For me, when I ran ghreboot.exe this deleted the virtual partition. YET, Ghost still won’t work. One of the problems that Ghost has is running on a heavily fragmented computer. The MBR may be fragmented on my computer. Per Symantec recommendation, I am running Diskeeper. If you read the first link, one of the SYM employees talks about how Virtpart.Dat needs to install unfragmented.

If you read here the whole way through, Sym list possible reasons for the cause.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/pfdocs/2002092510522725?Open&docid=2002092510522725&nsf=ghost.nsf&view=docid

and here is where you can trouble shoot the problems.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/on-technology.nsf/docid/1999021016253825

I hope saves you time as I have spent a ton of time on this issue.

Malcolm

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:42:34 +0000

Question: I was able to reboot(and it is working normally EXCEPT when trying to back up) in Windows XP(description below) yet there is still VIRTPART.DAT file in C: I believe this Virtual partition file(notice there isn’t a bracketed [] item on the drive(which I believe is an actual virtual partition ..correct me if I am wrong) is causing an error whenever I try to back up using Windows Backup or running Ghost. Can I simply delete this file in Windows Explorer? My computer is operating properly(rebooted 20+ times) so my thinking is that the correct partition is set. I can’t see how deleting the file this way will cause a problem since it is booting properly. If I shouldn’t delete it this way, please tell me. Also, when I go to Disk management, It see Drive 0 and the 4 normal partitions. It doesn’t see a virtual partition.

thanks
Malcolm

I had the same problem yet was able to reboot into Windows XP by using the SystemWorks 2004 Pro CD with Ghost 2003 on it to boot to run the virus scan. This takes you to A: then type C: then cd ghost. then ghreboot. Now Windo

By: aguy

aguy — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:46:47 +0000

badrah, thank you, you saved me!!!

Iwill throw all norton cds away after this

By: ayman Galal

ayman Galal — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:01:59 +0000

Dear Badrah

thx alot you save me

thanks again

By: stumit

stumit — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:22:14 +0000

[oops - wrong name!]

badrah – Awesome. You saved my bacon.

I don’t know if this has been covered anywhere else, but I found out why my system was hanging in DOS while trying to create an image. On my ASUS mobo, I needed to set the ide configuration to “Compatible”. Once I did that, everything ran fine.

Cheers all.

By: badrah

badrah — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:11:28 +0000

badrah – Awesome. You saved my bacon.

Cheers all.

By: GCC Tech

GCC Tech — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:51:35 +0000

This is Kylr B issue details:30GB Drive
Partition Table:
System -Start CHS -LBA -Size
0 FAT32 -0 1 1 -63 -29GB
1 FAT32 -0 1 5 -67 -29GB
2 FAT16
3 FAT16
Table 0 has no files. table 1 has all his old files but is missing the root and FAT table.
Fdisk and Gdisk don’t see the #1 partition at all. I assume Ghost moved the orig partition to LBA 67. Looking to creat a parition table with a start LBA of 67.

By: cliff

cliff — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:22:29 +0000

KYLR,
It sounds like you’re just stuck in the virtual partition. In this case, any of the methods described above should help you get out of it. If all else fails, the fdisk method seems to be the most reliable.

By: KYLR BURLESON

KYLR BURLESON — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:40:19 +0000

hello to whoever is reading this, im in a very bad way..a friend of mine has a medium sized business,which utilizes point sales registers..the whloe thing is run by a old windows 98se system.. the hard drive was beginning to degrade..i managed to do a scan disk and made it stable enough to ghost it to a new hard drive..now ive used ghost before..but something happened and now like the other people of the posts made in 2005 ive got a non-bootable virtual drive.. i did this as a favor and are recieving no monies for it.. but if this if this partition is lost years of settings/adjustments will have to be made from scrath..the problems will just snowball..i need someones help very much..im fairly compatant on a computer but am afraid to experiment with such a important irreplaceble item..could someone plz contact me directly by phone (605) 334 1342 if this needs to be posted,that is fine with me..after all..i was trying to help a friend..now i need someone elses help..thank you very much..kyle w burleson

By: mjia

mjia — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:10:51 +0000

Badrah,

Thanks for the information! You saved the day! I am certain that the FDISK method would have worked, but your GDISK commands worked flawlessly. THANKS again!

And for everyone else that reads this thread about the Ghost Virtual Partition, do NOT use Ghost 2003 on an SATA hard drive. It is what screwed up my computer for a couple of days. It could not properly access my SATA drives once it booted into the Ghost Virtual Partition.