Situation:Client.Training school. They have 12 computers running W98 connected by network to the instructor?s computer. They use removable HDD cases in all systems with floppy and DVD drives.
PROBLEM: Customer uses Disk Image by Powerquest to ghost these drives on a regular basis, her procedure is to clean out all the files and junk that the students may have created on one HDD and then ghost the remaining. She has done this with no problem since buying Disk image. On Thursday when she booted up one of the systems she received an error message ?operating system not found?. She then cleaned out one of the other systems and was going to ghost it to the system that had the error message. When she did this she received and error message ? the fat files are not identical and if she wanted to continue press cancel? she pressed cancel put the drives back in. The two machines produced error messages invalid system disk replace and press any key and operating system not found she tried it on another system with the same results.
DIAGNOSTICS: Tried booting with boot disk and tried fdisk and received error message no fixes disks found. From the dos prompt I found the c: drive and did dir but found no files. On one disk it had a fat 12-file system. The only way I could repartition and format the drive was to remove it from from the removable HDD tray and then it would find the disk and let me format and reload windows. When I finished and tried to put it back in the tray it said nooperating system found. I have swapped the HDD tray with several known good ones to no avail. I had to follow this procedure with all four and run them without the HDD trays. During windows install I received a message about the drive being compressed as well as not having enough disk space. I would hit escape and the install would be successful. I cannot get them to boot inside the HDD case only outside.
