Advent 8000 Series Recovery CD

If when you run the Advent Recovery CD, it just stops at a A:\> prompt, this is due to the Recovery CD expecting the CD-ROM drive to be drive D: and no other letter.

If you have added a second HDD, then you will need to go into the BIOS and disable it. If the drive has been compressed, then you will need to uncompress the drive first. If the drive has been partitioned, then you will need to delete the extra partitions.

"Cannot Write to Drive C"

If when you run the Recovery CD, it comes up with the message "Cannot Write to Drive C", the problem seems to relate to the BIOS auto detection. Go into the BIOS and choose Auto Hard Drive Detection, and choose the appropriate drive from the list it finds. Then start the recovery again, everything should now been fine. Also don't try a recovery with a Jazz drive as it throws GHOST a problem.

Command Interpreter Error

When running the Recovery CD on some of the Advents, you get the error message:

Error reading Drive a:
Invalid Command.com
Enter correct name of command interpreter:

The reason for this is that after agreeing to the usual "do you want to restore" questions on this recovery procedure and removing the floppy disk, you are then presented with the GHOST interface.

You then have to answer 2 questions:

1: Partition size correct (Yes/No)
2: Proceed with Disk Load (Yes/No)

Both questions must be answered YES.
The default answer for question 1 is YES,
The default for question 2 is NO.
You must change to YES before hitting "ENTER" on question 2.

8600 Series, Cannot Detect CDROM Drive

When trying to do the full recovery on the new Advent 8600 series you might get the error message "Interface board or CD-ROM drive is not ready. Ensure power is on and that the drive cables are correctly attached". There is probably nothing wrong with the drive or the disks; what you may have is the wrong recovery boot disk.

The Advent 8600s have a DVD drive, not a standard CD-ROM drive. The boot disk is trying to load the CDDRV.SYS driver, which is DOS driver for the ordinary Advent CD-ROM players.

You can get round this by editing the Config.sys file on the Recovery Boot disk. Look for the line for the CD-ROM Drive, and replace CDDRV.SYS with OAKCDROM.SYS. You'll then need to copy the OAKCDROM.SYS file either from the Windows 98 Startup Disk or from the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\EBD directory onto the Recovery boot disk.

Alternatively get in touch with Advent, and order the Advent Recovery Boot Disk for DVD drives.

8600 Series, "Bad Command or File Name"

This fault occurs right near the beginning of the recovery, before the GHOST program has started. After choosing yes to start the recovery, the message "Bad Command or File Name" appears and you are eventually dropped to a D:\ prompt. This means that the file REC8300.BAT on the CD is corrupted. As this is the file that runs the recovery process, you'll need to get hold of another Recovery CD.

Ghost Command

A lot of the Advent recovery CDs use the ghost software to extract the files back onto the computer. To run the file extraction manually, change onto the CD drive (D:) and type the following command -

ghost -clone,mode=load,src=d:\8000REC.img,dst=1 -sure -RB

NB - where 8000REC.img is the name of the image file on the CD.