China DOS Union

SONY VGN Z15t laptop comes with VISTA pre-installed. To install XP, a USB floppy drive was needed to load SATA drivers for the installation to proceed normally.

There are no SATA - related setting options in the BIOS setup, which is disabled. When booting from a cloned XP CD, the hard drive cannot be found at all.

Now the XP system has been installed, but the same problem occurs. How to make ghost read the hard drive in ACHI mode under DOS for backup?

You didn't even try it, did you? Ghost accesses the hard disk directly through BIOS without loading drivers.

Tried it. GHOST can't install XP

Originally posted by qwertl at 2009-2-6 21:38:
Tried it. GHOST can't install XP

Hehe, are you actually trying to install XP or restore/backup the C drive? It seems my Chinese is really not good enough.

Installation, backup/restore are all not working, can't find the hard drive at all. Is there a driver for SATA controllers that support the AHCI mode under DOS?

My ThinkPad laptop has ACHI mode enabled, and there's no problem with making and restoring Ghost images in DOS.

ACHI mode makes it impossible for me to load the SATA optical drive; I have to switch to Compatibility mode, which is really frustrating!

Is it because of the different versions of Ghost I'm using?

Mine is version 8.3. The compression ratio and stability are pretty good. I generally don't use the current 11.X.X.X versions.

No good. My Sony Z15 notebook is set to ACHI, and there's no way to modify it. To install the system, I have to find a USB floppy drive to do it. It's really troublesome.

Can you make a USB drive bootable, boot to DOS, and then see if it can recognize the hard drive? That's what mine is like. The CD drive can't be recognized at all under AHCI.

Can boot to DOS, PE can also, just can't find the hard drive. SATA driver not loaded

Heheh, after entering DOS, how did the person upstairs find the hard disk?

re qwertl:

I don't know what medium you used to enter DOS. I think you can definitely use a USB flash drive or a CD to enter DOS, and then use DOS tools: pqmagic or diskgen to check if there is a hard disk.

But there is one thing to remind you. If you bought a new notebook, its partition format may have problems (now manufacturers process the partition table to achieve one-key restore, which is not very strict. Even after entering pqmagic, it prompts that there are errors in the partition, which is completely possible. I have seen many new notebooks have this problem, including mine, but XP and Vista consider this normal).

Therefore, the possible reasons why you can't find the hard disk are as follows:
1. The partition structure of the hard disk is problematic. It is recommended to back up data, use pqmagic or diskgen to force re-partition, or use Linux to partition. The partition structure they generate is very traditional and strict.
2. All partitions of a newly purchased notebook are in NTFS format (one large C drive), so it is normal that the hard disk drive letter cannot be found in the DOS command line mode. It is recommended to use other tools to view the hard disk structure.
3. Whether the hard disk setting in BIOS can change the SATA-related mode to compatibility mode or IDE mode.

I hope you can describe the detailed situation of the problem, such as the DOS system used, the boot medium, the added drivers, the viewing tool, the prompt content when the problem occurs, etc., so that everyone can give more targeted suggestions.

Originally posted by knifeflying at 2009-2-22 10:54 AM:
re qwertl:

I don't know what medium you used to enter DOS. I think you can completely use a USB flash drive or a CD to enter DOS, and then use DOS tools: pqmagic or diskgen to check whether ...

The SONY VGN Z15t notebook computer is pre-installed with VISTA. To install XP, a USB floppy drive was used to install SATA drivers to proceed with the normal installation.
There are no settings related to SATA in the BIOS setup, which is disabled. Booting from a cloned XP CD cannot find the hard drive at all.
Now the XP system has been installed, but the same problem is encountered. How to make ghost read the hard drive in AHCI mode under DOS for backup?

In fact, in one sentence: Can the SATA hard drive in AHCI mode be backed up and restored under DOS?

[ Last edited by qwertl on 2009-2-24 at 21:05 ]

re qwertl：

My hard drive is a SATA one, and the AHCI mode is enabled. After entering DOS, I can see the hard drive and can use Ghost to back up or restore.
What you mentioned about booting with the clone XP CD, it's not that the hard drive isn't found, but after the most basic system boot, because there's no SATA optical drive driver, the optical drive can't be recognized, so the GHO file on the CD can't be found.
"Booting from the optical drive" and "recognizing the optical drive" are two different concepts. A DOS system can boot from the optical drive, but after entering, it can't load the optical drive driver and can't read the files on the CD. This is completely possible.
How did you install the XP on your machine now?

The key is I don't know how the original poster judges that the hard disk cannot be found under DOS.

SONY laptops can also make such a low-level mistake. It seems that Microsoft's influence is still too great.

Anyone who understands the development process of grub4dos should know this situation. Some manufacturers deliberately create incompatibility in the BIOS under Microsoft's instigation, preventing the continued survival of DOS and BIOS-based software (such as Grub4dos). This is a very shameless behavior. I boldly infer that this SONY laptop is a typical example. Its BIOS no longer supports the ACHI mode, resulting in all BIOS-based software being unable to access the hard disk. To put it simply, this laptop of it is designed specifically for VISTA and XP, and no longer supports real-mode software. The owner can install grub4dos under XP, then restart and enter grub4dos to see if the hard disk can be found. If grub4dos can find the hard disk, then DOS should also be able to access it.

As for the owner's problem, the owner can consider not using DOS + Ghost. You can completely use XP + Acronis True Image to do cloning.

In addition, you can also use PE + corresponding SATA drivers, and then use ghost32 to backup and restore cloning. However, this requires you to customize a PE yourself.