This is my long-winded experience with Ghost 9.
I've been having both a great time and horrible time with Ghost 9 for a solid week. I've been trying to Ghost three different winxp home pcs. I've come to the conclusing that there's no consistency on how Ghost 9 is going to work on anyone's given setup. Here's my feedback, tips, whatever you want to call it. Check this out........
I bought Ghost 9 and downloaded it from Symantec a couple of weeks ago. Unzipped it to the image file they send you. From there I burned about five copies of the cd with recordnow (as suggested by Symantec). Ok, I've got backup cds of the program and of course they're each bootable because that's the way the program is made. Just in case, I also saved the zip in case I ever have to make more program cds for myself. And, my one serial number works for every pc installation. Type in the serial, the program activates.
PC 1......a successful ghosting..eventually. I install Ghost on the first pc, a Compaq Presario p4 2.8. That machine has oem winxp which was originally full of the typical junk programs and apps that Compaq sends preloaded...which I had cleared off a few months ago. It's also one of those oem's that does NOT use a separate recovery partion for itself.
Anyway, I Ghosted that drive by choosing the "backup drive" option in the program, chose one of my hooked up dvd burners as the destination (an external Sony Drx500), chose the "single drive backup" option and away it went. About a half hour later, I had a finished dvd backup of the system on a dvd-r.
Now I turn the system off, stick in a brand new 80 gb WD drive that I partitioned and formatted (as a new storage drive...no os) with the WD tools utility (on another pc). Fresh new drive, no os.
Hour-long sidetrack #1...I pulled out the Presario c drive that I had just Ghosted, stuck in the new drive.....hooked up one of my old internal IDE nec burners for the restore (cuz I found out after four hours of trying that no matter what..THIS Ghost 9 on THIS system, refused to see any external usb drives during restore.....ok the best workaround was to simply put an internal dvd burner on one of the ide cables and, voila...the Ghost "advanced recovery of an entire drive" saw the dvd burner, saw my backup data.......and proceeded to restore my old c drive to the new 80 gb drive.
For restore options, I chose, "verify errors after restore", "restore mbr", "make drive bootable".
Hour-long sidetrack #2....I found out is that Symantec has the WRONG instructions on a couple of crucial steps...or at least they worked WRONG for this machine...First of all, at the recovery stage, there is a point where you have the program disk in and are prompted to "browse" to where the backup data is. Of course, the backup data is on a different dvd/cd than the program. No biggie...BUT, the instructions say to put in your data cd/dvd before you hit the "browse" button. WRONG. You have to hit "browse" WHILE the program cd is still in there because it's gonna look for some additional program info before it actually starts "browsing". If you take the program cd out when Symantec tells you, guess what? The whole program hangs and you have to reboot the whole pc back from the program cd again and start over. Bottom line after an hour of messing around is that I figured out to hit "browse" with the cd in and THEN, after the next browse window comes up..take the program cd out and stick in my data dvd. And even then, it takes a few seconds for the program to re-situate itself to give me a directory of the backup image on the dvd.
Hour-long sidetrack #3 .....On backup data spanned across several cds or dvds, the restore program will prompt you to put the next cd/dvd in. Just be careful that when you put the next cd/dvd in DON'T close the tray. i found out after three hours of failed restore attempts that when you put the next cd/dvd in, just click "ok" on the program and let IT close the tray. Otherwise, guess what? You close the tray manually, click ok, and the program gets all screwed up and says you put in the wrong cd/dvd. Guess what again? You have to exit the restore program and start all over. Is this documented anywhere? Nope.
I essentially blew a half a day ghosting and restoring the Presario, but at least I had some procedure notes for myself and the new drive did boot up just fine with everything completely intact. Now..Iwanted to have a third hard drive ready to go for the Presario...a drive that wouldn't have any online stuff etc. So, with the experience I had, I took out the newly Ghosted 80gb drive and proceeded to do the whole procedure again with another 80gb drive. This procedure went smooth. Install the newly formatted drive, boot the Presario from the Ghost 9 cd, and restore the data dvd following MY procedures developed from the previous try.
Worked perfect. I can now put any of the three drives in the Presario (one at a time of course) and winxp boots fine, all my programs work fine, and each drive consists of a slightly different layout of stuff. And to be safe, I installed Ghost on each of those two new drives after I had them set up and Ghosted those setups for if/when those drives crash in the future.
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NOW...hey I'm feeling pretty good about the procedure so I turn to my HP P4 and intend to do the very exact same thing, only this time with a fresh standalone version of Winxp that I bought at Staples. This version comes already mounted with SP1.
I install win xp. Upgrade the security stuff but not SP2. I install Ghost 9. I backup to my external dvd burner again. Set Backup to verify. Verifies as a-ok. Stick in a new hard drive to the HP, check out the "restore" program of Ghost 9 to see if it sees my external Sony burner (Once again,,NOPE, it doesn't...even though the Symantec site and Gear site specifically list this burner as supported). No biggie. I already KNOW the workaround. I hook up the internal nec burner to the Hp, start up the Ghost restore, and everything whirls by.
At the end of the restore to the new drive, I take out the Ghost cd, and reboot the pc, expecting it to come up just like the Presario did.
Ehh..wrong answer. Pc won't boot. After days of experimenting my final results are either messages about hardware not reading boot correctly, or simply a hanging dos cursor blinker at boot....SO....
4 day long sidetrack #1...to date, I can not restore Ghost backup images to the HP no matter what I try. I can put a Ghosted hp drive into the d drive slot of any other pc in here and visually see that the program folders that Ghost put on the new drive are all there. They all look to be intact. But the drive(s) (I've now tried this on two brand new drives on the HP) will not boot.
You can give all sorts of opinions, but I probably already tried them after long, boring reading about Ghost problems. I've tried all of the following so far on this pc........
Backup using different backup media/burners (I have three different brand dvd/cd burners and plenty of various media). Tried them all.
...Load the HP oem winxp on the pc and try Ghosting that kind of system setup (as had worked fine with the Presario)
Do another fresh install of standalone xp and then upgrade to SP2 and try to Ghost.
Format the new drives to all zeros with killdisk and then re-partition.....or don't partition......format via winxp internal drive setup routine..format with WD data tools.
Use Ghost's "disk copy" feature instead of first ghosting.
Ghost the image to a second hard drive in the system instead of dvd and then try a recovery of that image to a newly formatted drive.
Use "restore mbr" on recovery. Don't use "restore mbr"...I've tried both ways.
Use "disk signature". Don't use disk signature. Tried both.
Tried to do the whole thing with WD, Maxtor, and Seagate drives.
Everything above........tried them all.
About the only thing I haven't gotten into yet is this third party routine called BootItNg that somehow rewrites or resets the disk signature...which Ghost 9 is supposed to do automatically.......and apparently did do okay with on those earlier reinstalls on the Presario. Maybe I'll look at that, maybe not.
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One last thing I tried. I bought another wd drive this weekend (they're so inexpensive now) and formatted it yesterday using the wd tools (as a storage drive, no os).
I stuck this drive in the Presario, pulled out my standalone WinXP box and did a fresh install of that XP on the Presario (the previous successful ghosting on the Presario was with Compaq oem Winxp). After installing the standalone winxp, I updated the security stuff, updated to service pak 2 (as I had done on the HP), installed Ghost, and did a drive backup. I then wrote the drive with zeros with killdisk and then reformatted it again to empty it all out (yeah I know this is all taking a lot of time). Then, with the new drive empty again, I recovered the drive on the Presario, using the same setup I've used for all these tests.
Worked fine. The drive, created from the Ghost, boots up fine on the Presario.
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I have concluded that it doesn't matter whether one is trying to ghost a standalone Winxp or an oem xp. It doesn't matter whether or not SP2 is involved. There are just some pieces of equipment that Ghost 9 is not going to successfully restore on. IF YOU HAVE FURTHER OPINIONS/INPUT, ID'D SURE APPRECIATE IT.
As you can tell if you've read all this, I could have done fresh reinstalls and manual tweaking of a bunch of drives faster than trying to figure out Ghost 9. Until I get better info, I'll probably do just that. Use Ghost on the Presario and simply have a couple of extra HP system drives (manually set up) around for the eventual inevitable crashes. And continue to keep my data backed up on dvd and not lose track of where all my program cd's are kept.
Needless to say, I've not even attempted to deal with any of this on the third HP pc that's here.
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