I have been using AVAST for many years without seeing this issue however several searches have lead me to believe AVAST may have a hand in this, read on…
Every month I take an image of my XP Pro system drive with Norton Ghost 2003, this is something I have done ever since I can remember.
I took my last copy on 10/03/12, just after one avast software upgrade but just before the latest.
Last night I had need to restore from that image, all appeared fine until I tried to log in. The PC gets stuck at applying user settings. This is something I have done without problems for many years but it appears to no longer work.
I tried several times with no success, eventually I had to use an image taken in January.
I have been googling everywhere and some people have reported that uninstalling AVAST solves the issue
Hence the reason why I am posting here to see if anyone knows a reason why a recent AVAST would be causing issues logining into a restored image and any workarounds I can use to get this image back.
Well… I can’t imagine a reason for the imaged system have problems if the original one does not have.
The problem is that when we take an image from the system, the good and the bad goes to the image.
Any other security application that could have messed with the original system (before the the backup)?
Zonealarm is the only other product but I haven’t updated that for nearly a year and the January image would have the same version. I am beginning to wish I hadn’t restored as it was only because I wanted to cleanly remove a program I had just installed
That is one option I will be trying this weekend along with restoring back to the January image and re-updating AVAST from that point and taking another image to see if the problem is re-creatable.
It does indeed appear to be Avast causing the issue
Last night I restored the March ghost image and booted it into safe mode, upon entering safe mode I got the “Windows has finished installing new hardware, do you want to reboot” prompt I usually get after a ghost restore. So I decided to see what happened if I rebooted out of safe mode.
The PC worked fine and I could log in and out without problem.
I them took a ghost image of the machine at this point, restoring this new image still had the same issues and entering safe mode sorted it out.
OK, so I decided to do further investigations.
I restored the image again, problem returned until I used the safe mode trick.
So I went into safe mode and uninstalled Avast, rebooted into normal and took a ghost image again.
I then restored this image and did not experience the issue.
I then restored the image that had Avast installed and experienced the issue again.
As one last test I restored the image yet again but this time used the ghost command line of -FDSP
-FDSP Clone Force Disk Signature Preserve. Use to resolve bootup failures after cloning a disk on a Windows 2000/XP computer, especially when the disk and controller are the same in the source and destination computers, but the partition sizes or layout are different. This switch preserves the signature bytes on the destination disk when performing a disk-to-disk or image-to-disk cloning operation. This switch prevents Ghost from automatically forcing a disk initialization, which Ghost does by default when imaging a Windows 2000/XP disk. Symantec Ghost 8.0
Norton Ghost 2003
This worked and the machine let me log in fine and had no new hardware prompt.
It would therefore appear that Avast is causing the issue and it may have something to do with the fact that a restored ghost image will always cause a new hardware prompt on first boot.
This is most definitely something that was not occuring a few months ago.
