Question : How do I get Symantec Ghost to work with these ThinkPad SL500 laptops?

My organization just purchased several Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 laptops.  I configured one to my liking, installed the Ghost Console Client on it, and then attempted to pull an image off of it (through the network) onto our Ghost server.  The image creation process would proceed normally for a few minutes, and then freeze, and after a long time (maybe 20-30 minutes) I would finally get an error message from Ghost, saying "ABORT: 29003, Bad block(s) encountered on read....".

After retrying this several times, I attempted to pull an image off using a Ghost boot CD and an external hard drive, with the same results.

After doing some searching online, I learned that Lenovo laptops come with special partitions on them, which can interfere with Ghosting.  However, I thought I had eliminated those, because the first thing I did was to reinstall Windows XP, and during the installation process, I deleted all three of the partitions that were originally on the hard drive (1 for Windows Vista, and 2 special Lenovo recovery partitions).

After this, I tried to use DBAN 1.07 to completely erase the drive, thinking that would surely eliminate the troublesome partitions, but to my surprise DBAN 1.07 kept shutting down before it could do anything.  I then attempted to use DBAN Beta 2.0 and it was able to erase the drive (I chose the "write zeros on the disk, for internal redeployment option).

After DBAN, I reinstalled Windows XP again, and tried to pull an image... but no luck.

I have also tried using the -IB switch with Ghost as some people suggested, but no good.

Some people have suggested that I go into the BIOS and disable the "IBM Predesktop" but I can find nothing like that in the BIOS.

I have also tried running the hard drive diagnostic utility (provided on the Lenovo site) and it claims the disk is healthy.

Finally, I have tried all of this on a second ThinkPad SL500 with the same results, so it's not just limited to this one particular laptop.

Please help, I am completely out of ideas, and going crazy!!!

-Ben

Answer : How do I get Symantec Ghost to work with these ThinkPad SL500 laptops?

I ended up getting this resolved by changing the SATA controller mode to AHCI.  As long as it is in AHCI mode, Ghost seems to work fine, but compatibility mode, not so much.

I ended up slipstreaming AHCI drivers onto a XP CD, and reinstalling Windows on the laptops and everything has worked fine since.