Disk imaging with Norton Ghost 9.0

[Ichinisan]

My first experience with this, I'm royally ticked off.

Before troubleshooting a notoriously unstable system for a customer, I connected the hard drive to my computer using a USB adapter and told Norton Ghost 9.0 to backup the entire drive. The drive. I did not choose to back up a particular partition or files on the drive; I wanted an entire disk image that I could restore after writing zeroes and running a surface scan on the drive. That's what Norton Ghost is for, right? It is not a simple file backup utility, it's a freaking disk imaging tool! So why did it fail so miserably? The disk that I imaged booted normally before and after imaging. After I wrote zeroes and performed an intense surface scan with Western Digital's diagnostic tools (it passed everything 100%), I restored the image and was infurated to see that Ghost was asking me to set the partition as active or select a drive letter! If that information was on the drive before imaging, Ghost had better damn put it back the way it was! It indicates that I should set the partition as "active" for booting Windows, then asks me for a drive letter. Because the drive is connected to my own system, drive "C:" is not available as a drive letter to select! No matter what I choose (even leaving the drive letter blank), when I try to boot the drive in the original system it stops loading on the welcome screen while still showing the high-resolution Windows XP logo. The mouse pointer never becomes unresponsive.

I was as careful as possible and I imaged this system because a Windows reinstall was not an option. I do not have the original WinXP Home installation disk and there is also critical software that the customer uses in his profession. Has anyone had this experience before? Should I bitch to Symantec for selling this crap software to me that did not perform it's one simple function? Is there anything I can do to make the "restored" drive boot again?

 

[furballi]

Wipe the HDD again. Create a primary active partition and restore the image file. I would NEVER rely on USB for disc imaging. Use the Master/Slave IDE connection!

 

[spike spiegal]

You're right - Ghost is not exactly the most intuitive tool for doing disk back-ups, and in this respect there's too many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. Symantec should delegate this product to more experienced IT shops because I've seen too many people run into problems with it out in the field. It is *not* turn-key product as much as Symantec says it is.

I haven't used the latest version, but have used older versions since 98'. My experience with Ghost has been:

- Disk copies are less reliable than partition level copies because you don't have to mess around setting active partitions and other nonsense.

- USB2 boot access is flaky and unreliable because there is no universal DOS USB support on the PC platform. I prefer either a packet IP driver to Ghost across a network (slow and tends to drag a network down to it's knees), or simply plugging in an extra IDE HD.

- Creating an image or the disk/partition is more reliable than simply copying.

The restored drive likely has the customer's critical data on it, but Windows XP has a drive C:/D: designation malfunction. So, the OS is hosed. At least the customers data is there which can be retrieved by plugging the drive into another computer.

 

[Ichinisan]

The 9.0 version of Ghost is a rebranded app that was previously a competitior's product. The bootable interface is a trimmed-down XP live boot that only displays the Ghost app and doesn't have useful imaging options.

Sure, the data is still on the restored drive, but the professional applications can't be moved so easily. Also, Microsoft Office is installed. I performed the backup from within Windows on my own computer and I performed the restore the same way. Ghost did not have to load unreliable USB drivers or boot to it's own interface. I see no reason why this should fail.

I would have used Ghost 2003 because it was included in the same package. However, I could not tell which was the older/better product, so I just went with 9.0 since I would be doing the backup and restore from within Windows anyway. I'm getting the impression that the rebranded product was really meant for file backup, NOT disk imaging.

Originally posted by: spike spiegal
- Disk copies are less reliable than partition level copies because you don't have to mess around setting active partitions and other nonsense.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Creating a copy of the entire disk including all partitions should preserve the partition information. Creating a backup of a partition with options to change attributes of the partition would be asking for trouble.

Originally posted by: furballi
Wipe the HDD again. Create a primary active partition and restore the image file. I would NEVER rely on USB for disc imaging. Use the Master/Slave IDE connection!

I purchased the USB adapter so that I could easily do backups by attaching the hard drive to my own computer and performing the backup while Windows is running. I was not relying on questionable USB support from a boot disc.

 

[furballi]

Again, DO NOT rely on USB for mission critical stuff like drive imaging. Don't be lazy when it comes to data.

 

[Ichinisan]

IDE connectors were not designed to be frequently connected/disconnected. My system would be worn out and eventually damaged if I connected every drive to IDE for future backups. A bad IDE cable can be a troubleshooting nightmare. It would be a worse idea to attempt the backup in the unstable system.

In this case, the USB interface is 100% inconsequential. It was retarded programming logic that is responsible for this failure.

 

[Thor86]

Use Ghost2003. No issues with parition/drive imaging even using USB/SATA.

As the previous poster stated, you need to format/partition the disk just as it was before, before restoring the image.

I would have created seperate images for each partition, but that should matter anyway.

 

[pcman83]

Acronis FTW

 

[Ichinisan]

Originally posted by: Thor86
Use Ghost2003. No issues with parition/drive imaging even using USB/SATA.

As the previous poster stated, you need to format/partition the disk just as it was before, before restoring the image.

I would have created seperate images for each partition, but that should matter anyway.

I tried installing XP Pro and deleting/recreating the partition during the install. Then I connected the drive to my computer using the USB adapter and restored the image. Still, Windows stops loading at the same point when I put the drive back into the original system (using IDE).

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Put the drive back in the system with the image on it. Boot to the XP CD. go past the 1st screen where it asks if you want to do a new install or a repair. Say new. It will then check for existing versions of windows. When it finds the current one on there it will ask if you want to repair it. Say yes. It will go through the whole process of installing the OS( like from scratch) but when it's done and you boot to the hard drive, the original version of windows will be back and all the programs are useable. I do this for all my motherboard swaps so I don't have to start over on everything.

edit: this works with XP Pro, XP Pro SP2, Win2000. I haven't tried it with Home, but I dount it would be any different.

 

[Ichinisan]

I had already tried a repair install. I don't have the customer's XP Home disc, so I had no choice but to try another person's XP Home disc and it fails during the repair install. I'll have to try to get the original disc somehow, but I don't know if my customer has it.

Each past experience that I have had with "repair" installations left the applications botched or partially installed.