Norton Ghost 10.0 what gives?

[Steve52]

I read on the Ghost 2003 manual a little this morning. I really think what I need to do is get a burner (might as well get a dvd burner since they are so cheap now) and load Ghost 2003 on the HTPC and backup to DVD. One DVD should hold everything on the C: drive as it is only for the operating system and STV. According to the manual you can boot from this burned DVD and restore from it in case of a crash. Only rub would be if Ghost 2003 did not have a driver for the DVD burner. Does this sound like a good plan?

[evilpenguin]

Burning the image straight to DVD is pretty much exactly what I do and it works great , I highly recommend it. Just for reference I use a Memorex 16x burner.

[Steve52]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Burning the image straight to DVD is pretty much exactly what I do and it works great , I highly recommend it. Just for reference I use a Memorex 16x burner.

Have you ever had to actually restore the system from this DVD backup, and if so did it work ok? And, Did you have to somehow load a driver for your dvd burner or did Norton have the driver in it to start with?

[AndyS]

I just had problems with Ghost 2003 trying to back up a brand new MCE machine. It turns out that Ghost 2003 doesn't support SATA drives, which left me with an unbootable PC. Take care with Ghost if you're using SATA.

I think there may be a workaround but it involves tweaking BIOS settings and (I think) unplugging drives, so I don't consider that a practical proposition. Of course YMMV!


Andy.

[Steve52]

Originally Posted by AndyS

I just had problems with Ghost 2003 trying to back up a brand new MCE machine. It turns out that Ghost 2003 doesn't support SATA drives, which left me with an unbootable PC. Take care with Ghost if you're using SATA.

I think there may be a workaround but it involves tweaking BIOS settings and (I think) unplugging drives, so I don't consider that a practical proposition. Of course YMMV!


Andy.

Well that ends that, all of my drives are SATA. I have three HDDs and all are SATA II. I guess I have run out of options with Norton Ghost no matter the version.

[AboveUnrefined]

If your drives are SATA and you don't have an option in your BIOS to emulate PATA through SATA then running ghost in DOS might be a problem for you. To run ghost in DOS you need to make a boot disk of somesort (floppy or cdrom) ghost should have a floppy utility to make a boot floppy.

After you get booted into the DOS utility then you can select what drive you want to create an image from and then select where you want to put that image (needs to be either onto CD/DVD or onto a different hard drive, you can use high compression too if you opted). I know you can also make images from partitions and not whole disks, but I'm unfamiliar with it as I always have done disk images for continuity's sake (boot sectors, etc) upon restoration.

There is a DOS utility disk that includes a bunch of disk image creation programs (including ghost) amongst other very handy apps, but due to it's copyright issues I can't quite post info about it...

I can post these links, however: http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilit...andimage.shtml http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ -- you can see if any of these might be of help, I think knoppix includes some stuff on it too if your setup is really out of the realm of performing DOS clones.

[stevech]

Interesting thing about Acronis TruImage is that it runs under windows to make the backup (concurrently).

The Acronis bootable restore CD is LInux which would support SATA

[Steve52]

Originally Posted by stevech

Interesting thing about Acronis TruImage is that it runs under windows to make the backup (concurrently).

The Acronis bootable restore CD is LInux which would support SATA

I am trying to sell my copy of Ghost 10.0. If it sells I may give Acronis a try. What is the best version number to use with SATA II drives.

[jimwhite]

again, as said above, SATA "IS" supported by the older (DOS Based) versions of Ghost but it requires your BIOS be set to emulation mode, not enhanced mode.... and as a matter of note, I've found that the disk throughput performance in windows is HIGHER in emulation mode !!!

[srothwell]

Originally Posted by cord

I'll have to echo the Acronis endorsement. You can even buy a fully licensed (download) copy from newegg for quite a large discount over retail. True Image has saved my bacon three times, since my laptop seems to destroy hard drives on a regular basis. I've never lost a single byte of data, except the one time I hadn't let the incremental backup run for a week.

I also have to echo praise with TrueImage.

I bought it at this forum's reccomendation and I couldn't be happier. Best of all it's not a Symmantec product that slows down your PC.

[jptaz]

Another thing I have heard and can not confirm with newer versions of ghost is that it can not handle RAID drives. Probably for the same reason it can not handle SATA drives. Ghost apparently is too stupid to deal with disks on a logical basis and is too invasive and wants too look at the actual hardware. I know Acronis works with RAID since we have done it at my office and it works flawlessly in windows...at least for us it did. We even booted off a CD and retored the RAID that way and it worked. I believe we did the restore via a bartpe windows boot cd, but it worked great.

John

[jptaz]

Just to clarify we are using Acronis 9.1 Coproration and not the Home edition. The corporation edition appears to be a much better product, but it is pricey $699 to $999. I don't know what kind of support the lesser versions have for RAID, but will probably try it myself this weekend.

John

[stevech]

Originally Posted by srothwell

I also have to echo praise with TrueImage.

I bought it at this forum's reccomendation and I couldn't be happier. Best of all it's not a Symmantec product that slows down your PC.

Happy (very) with Acronis TruImage and DiskDoctor for 2 years now.

Norton Ghost seems like an abandoned rusted hulk by comparison.

[rickgillyon]

Ghost 10 works fine for me, on all my systems including Sage server and client. Pseudo-client on the server still runs. Backs up and restores my SATA and SATA2 drives too. You guys must not be using it right...

Ghost is a rusting hulk, which is why Symantec bought DriveImage, which has been a far superior product to Ghost for a long time. It's got me out of a few scrapes, I can tell you...

[stevech]

Never used DriveImage - - I dumped Ghost because it rebooted to DOS during the backup operation. Dumb.

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by stevech

Never used DriveImage - - I dumped Ghost because it rebooted to DOS during the backup operation. Dumb.

Yup, that's why they bought DriveImage and rebranded it, because it images under Windows.

[Steve52]

FYI,
I was the OP for this thread, and I have been surprised at how strongly people feel about their backup software. FWIW I finally did get Ghost 10.0 working. I have not actually restored a backup so I guess that is really unproven, but it appears to be working correctly now. My problem as it turned out was not so much with Ghost anyway, but with .net. as .net and STV were trying to load at the same time I think locking up my computer and sending the CPU to 100% and never seeming to finish loading. When I disabled the user required logon in .net, Ghost loaded just fine with no problem from STV. I have made a few backups of my system drive C: from an SATA II drive to a DVD burner on -R media with no problems. I have some +RW DVD media on order I am going to try.

Steve

[rickgillyon]

It's always worth testing a restore before you have to...

I think that people don't neccessarily feel too strongly about backup soft, but people do dislike the Norton/Symantec suite of products with good reason. I've seen many systems ground to a halt by the Internet Security bloatware, or corrupted by Norton Utils (which people wrongly think will make their systems run better). However, Ghost 9 and 10 are very good products IME. Baby/bathwater etc. Just don't install the rest of Norton Systemworks!