Hi Guys,
 
I rebuilt an XP DAW and the main disk has 2 partitions. However when I use an older bootable version of Ghost it doesn't see things like XP does.  In XP they are seen as C:SYS_VOL and D:SAMP_VOL, both reflected as primary partitions.  All this is what I would expect.  However Ghost sees the system partition as NO_NAME while the other partition appears as expected (SAMP_VOL).   I don't believe this to be a problem within Ghost, rather there is likely something not properly written on the MBR/Partitions to enable Ghost to understand the system partition name/label.  Any ideas how I can get the system partition to be correctly reflected in programs outside of XP such as Ghost? 
 
Sonic

I assume this worked correctly on the old system so a few questions: Is this a new hard drive or simply a re-partition of the old drive? Is the drive SATA or PATA? SSD or HDD? Are the partitions formatted NTFS or FAT32?

New hard drive.  It is SATA but the BIOS is set for Legacy emulation so all software uses it as a conventional ATAPI/IDE type interface.  (Hope I said that right, but I'm sure you can at least understand what's going on)
 
It is formatted with FAT32.  System partition is 10GB and sample partition 50GB.  In my initial testing of the DAW rebuild process I ended up used different tools and approaches to partitioning and formatting the drive.  So this current case is not a "virgin" partition scenario.  In some instances I let XP OS installer do the job, in others I used a Western Digital tool, or DOS command line. And of course the disk manager inside XP. So I can't say for sure how this specific instance was partitioned & formatted.  Only that whatever was used was in the realm of industry-standard stuff.  I'm pretty sure in this specific situation I used the DOS command prompt from within XP recovery mode to format the system volume in order to blow away the preceding XP test-OS, and then used the XP installer to format it again during re-install.  
 
Sonic
 
 

I believe the issue might be with Ghost as it can potentially have issues with SATA drives. I think, though I can't be certain, that this has to do with the different cabling. Conventional drives use a single cable to connect 2 drives, one master, one slave. The SATA of course only uses one with no master/slave designation. Earlier versions of Ghost, and maybe later I'm not sure, would get confused when the cabling was not connected properly. For example a drive connected to the slave connector on the IDE cable with the jumper set to master.
 
Incidentally, are you using legacy mode because XP did not recognize the drive during install?
 
I can't definitively say this is what your problem is but if the partitions show up in XP correctly I would think they are fine. You could run a chkdsk to verify. I reluctantly gave up using Ghost years ago and now use Acronis True Image. It might be worthwhile to download a trial copy, of this or some other program, and see if the partitions show up as you expect.

No, the issue isn't the drive being SATA, Ghost and everything else sees it just fine and the partitions are working fine.  But outside Windows, any DOS/Win98 type bootable utilities seem not to be able to recognize the NAME of the system partition.  It comes up as NO_NAME, while the other partition's label is seen just fine. So something is going on, but I don't understand what.  Not only do I need to see the system volume name for ease of use when imaging, etc I also want to understand what is behind this anomaly so I don't have some unanticipated surprise down the road once I put this machine into use.  I'm assuming there is something missing, or written incorrectly, in the MBR/partition table.
 
Sonic

So I am assuming that you have not tried the obvious long shot of renaming the no-name drive in your XP disk management. If there is truly a problem with the way the name is written to the disk index, that might be expected to solve it. Are you booting into Ghost when it fails to report the disk name?

That was my next "silly question". Occam's razor.

I tried the rename approach inside XP Disk Manager and it didn't change anything with respect to Ghost still seeing the volume name as NO NAME.
 
And yes, I am booting into Ghost.

It seems there may be some issue in early disk-based utilities.  I found some threads on the web about this but couldn't find a resolution.  Seems people tried to use some utiliies to re-print the MBR/Partition but no-one ever responded back as to what they actually used to do it nor the details of how.
 
Somewhere in the 2000-2003 range there was a time where the Windows NT based PC's were laying down certain MBR/Partition & FS info that some utilities, including Ghost 2003, could not understand.  Or rather maybe were expecting something different, at least as far as the Volume/Label goes.  I actually found a neat little stand-alone program from that era that also reported the same "NO NAME" for the partition in question.  It's probably as simple as just getting a tool to read the sector, change the name, and save it back.  But I have no idea where to find such a thing, that is also user-friendly.
 
Did I mention I really hate computers....?   

So you are saying that ghost (?version) boot environment is not the only program that cannot see the partition name? I think if you are going back far enough, the ghost boot environment is 16 bit DOS. There was as I recall also a requirement that Ghost mark the drive in some way to show that you are using a legal copy of the program, and maybe required a "virtual partition" to run. Without that marking it could not access the drive/partition. Have you installed Ghost on your XP system? Have you tried running Ghost from within XP? Ghost is no longer available, and there are several free partition managers and cloners that support XP that might be better. Have you tried a Linux boot environment (many of those freebies use one) to see how it sees your partition names?