[CarnageA]

I have an old Packard Bell running windows XP. A few days ago it experienced a sewere slowdown and I was forced to manually restart it. After I started it up it refused to let me in into any accounts. So I decided to do a system restore. However, just as the system restore started it crashed with a red screen with an error message:
Abort: 29004, Read sector failure
Now I can't system restore my computer which is a nuisance.

I searched around the web for a while and found out that this error is cause by a bad sector on my hard drive (Scandisk found and patched 1 bad sector). And that there is a way to deal with this by forcing ghost using an image recreated with a switch. But none of the internet pages explicitly explain what it is or how to do it.

So here is my question. How to operate ghost or whether it is possible to operate it at all? I really have no clue. Any help would be appreciated.

[Advertisements]

If you're talking about Norton's GHOST, which is really the only Ghost I'm familiar with, then for it to do you any good, you would have had to own a copy of Ghost and then used it to make a Ghost Backup Image file, of your C: drive and you would have had to have stored that image on either another hard drive or burned it to DVD(s). Got all that?

To even think about using Ghost after you already have a problem is "too little, too late".

I've been burning Ghost backups of my C: drives using various versions of Ghost, since it first came out in about 1997. I now use Ghost 2003 to back up my XP system on at least a weekly basis.
I also use Ghost 11.5 to back up my Windows 7 installation. Both versions need to be run from a DOS boot disk of some type, to operate effectively.

So in your case, drive recovery (repair) is what you need to do, not think about using Ghost. It's too late for that.

Even one bad sector on a HD is evidence that it's starting to fail and should be replaced.

Good Luck,


PS: You did mention a "severe slowdown" and that's a sign of a real and very bad hard drive failure.
I copied all the data files off of a drive like that a while back and due to the slowness of the drive, it took three days to just copy the data files to another hard drive. Thank God, the drive lasted through that procedure, but I had it slaved to another computer, so the OS on the drive was not running. And, I was fan-cooling the drive through the whole procedure, so it never got above room temperature.

Edited by TheShadowFL, 02 March 2011 - 12:38 PM.

[TheShadowFL]

If you're talking about Norton's GHOST, which is really the only Ghost I'm familiar with, then for it to do you any good, you would have had to own a copy of Ghost and then used it to make a Ghost Backup Image file, of your C: drive and you would have had to have stored that image on either another hard drive or burned it to DVD(s). Got all that?

To even think about using Ghost after you already have a problem is "too little, too late".

I've been burning Ghost backups of my C: drives using various versions of Ghost, since it first came out in about 1997. I now use Ghost 2003 to back up my XP system on at least a weekly basis.
I also use Ghost 11.5 to back up my Windows 7 installation. Both versions need to be run from a DOS boot disk of some type, to operate effectively.

So in your case, drive recovery (repair) is what you need to do, not think about using Ghost. It's too late for that.

Even one bad sector on a HD is evidence that it's starting to fail and should be replaced.

Good Luck,


PS: You did mention a "severe slowdown" and that's a sign of a real and very bad hard drive failure.
I copied all the data files off of a drive like that a while back and due to the slowness of the drive, it took three days to just copy the data files to another hard drive. Thank God, the drive lasted through that procedure, but I had it slaved to another computer, so the OS on the drive was not running. And, I was fan-cooling the drive through the whole procedure, so it never got above room temperature.

Edited by TheShadowFL, 02 March 2011 - 12:38 PM.

[peter99]

In earlier version’s of ghost I have used there is a box to tick to ignore bad sectors
this I think is what you mean, do you have a recovery partition or disks.

[CarnageA]

Yes. Usually I use the master DVD to restore my PC to factory settings. It ignores the storage drive so I never loose data. So I used my old PC as a large USB stick.

Thing is I never used Norton Ghost. I am trying to use the Master DVD to system restore the PC. I was wondering whether there is a way to make it skip the bad sectors. Because when system restore started it deleted the operating system then died. So on startup it demands the Master DVD but refuses to carry on the system restore and gives me a red screen.