Technical question: Hard drive cloning

I had to make a backup copy (clone) of a hard drive today, but had some problems.

I used Norton Ghost 7 on a Windows NT 4 machine. The stiffy drive didn't work so I put the 2 drives in a Windows 98 machine where I could boot to DOS.
The 8.4GB HDD is partitioned into 2.7GB FAT and a 5.7GB NTFS drives. The FAT partition has got the OS on and all the data + Oracle is stored on the NTFS partition.
The cloning process worked fine, but when I tried to test the cloned disk in the NT machine I couldn't boot from it and couldn't access the NTFS patition. When I put the original disk back, I couldn't access the NTFS partition either. Also I couldn't access the other 6.4GB NTFS hard drive in the machine.

I then proceeded to pull my hair out by the handful 😠

I then checked the disk on my XP box and could see both partitions fine.
Thankfully I got the data back and could get the machine up and running again but the cloned disk is useless.

What gives?
Anyone have any ideas?

I'm not sure whether I understood you entirely. Essentially, if I understood you correctly, you've copied the partitions and all data from an old drive that contained an operating system and was a bootable drive to a new one, and are now trying to boot from the new drive, that should be identical to the original one. Am I correct?

I'm not sure if this will help, and this might be something you know/have tried already, but in order for you to be able to boot from a partition that has an operating system, that partition has to be set as the active partition (or the boot partition... I'm not sure of the terminology). That can be done from DOS using FDISK - there's an option there to set a partition active.

You might want to try to first hook up the new hard drive, then boot into a dos prompt from separate a boot-disk, then run FDISK, set the partition with the operating system active, and then try to boot from that drive.

I've got no formal training in computer hardware, so be warned. What I know comes from the hazy memory of struggling with a similar hard-drive dillemma a year or two ago.

-Jarno

Thanks for the reply.
What Ghost does is copy the entire filesystem over, so theoretically the cloned drive should be an exact copy (bootable, the lot).
Now the cloned drive isn't booting NT from the first partition and the logical NTFS partition is gone for some reason.

This is what is confusing me, because when cloning a Windows 9x drive, I didn't have any problems.

Originally posted by Crowley
Thanks for the reply.
What Ghost does is copy the entire filesystem over, so theoretically the cloned drive should be an exact copy (bootable, the lot).
Now the cloned drive isn't booting NT from the first partition and the logical NTFS partition is gone for some reason.

This is what is confusing me, because when cloning a Windows 9x drive, I didn't have any problems.