Need Help with Ghost

I am unable to create an image with Norton Ghost.

When I run it, I navigate through to create the image, however when it asks me where to write the image file to, I do not get the option to save to the drive on my primary IDE channel.

I get an option to save to floppy, CD, or virtual RAMdrive it appears.

The drive I am trying to image is a Raptor on a PCI sata card, the drive I am trying to image to is a diamondmax plus9 on my primary IDE channel. I do not have the option to save to that drive though.

I was able to write to my plextor, but I want to write one image file straight to the drive.

Any suggestions experience? I don't have any problems doing this multiple times everyday at work, but we are usually sending images between network locations, never on the same PC.

Subscribes to this thread because he has the same problem with his Raptor to WD 120jb, using Norton Ghost 2003

A trend. Thanks for posting knowles.

Can't answer your question, but all I can say is that I no longer will use anything Norton. I think everything they make sucks!

Well it would appear that some information around suggests that ghost sucks with RAID... Although I image up to network RAID storage all the time, so that doesn't compute right with me. I think it likely that I'm missing something.

Where's Xaotic?

I'm around, but trapped on a conference call. I'd heard of some issues previously, but haven't had time to fully research it yet and I use a different product for backup and imaging. I'll have a chance soon, this project is almost complete. I'll try to dig up a way to integrate the drivers, since driver issues are the most likely cause and later versions do support NTFS.

Imaging to a network drive, RAID or not, is all controlled by the OS on the networked machine or appliance. This should be a local machine issue.

Edit: I've been rereading the post and have a potential solution. Ghost will read NTFS partitions, but I doubt it will save images on them. Can you try to save to a FAT32 partition? If not, I'll have a chance to load an OS on a native SATA drive this weekend and give it a shot.

If you use partition to partition copy it should work fine.I use this all the time to image my raid arrays.I do not have Ghost 2003 but Ghost 7.I am going to assume that it still works in DOS.It does work with NTFS.It will copy and write NTFS and has for a long time,at least since the 2001 version.SP updates caused errors and had to be run with switches in 2001 but it still worked fine.
To read/write NTFS the DOS program must have that ability so Ghost disks made with 98 boot disk will not work.If you have a DOS Ghost version you can use DOS 7.10 to make the disk adding the Ghost program to it.You will have to type ghost.exe at the prompt to run it.Dos 7.10 can be found here.

Alright, here is some more description of my how ghost behaves for me:

I can perform a disk to disk clone from my raptor to the PATA drive. No problem.

I cannot perform a disk to image from my raptor to the PATA.

When I perform a disk to disk, it asks me for source drive and destination drive as well as license number, then performs the clone no problem. All drives are recognized and available options (PATA on primary master, raptor on SATA PCI adapter, and PATA on IDE FASTTRAK PCI adapter). My drives are configured this way so that they all have dedicated channels, and so that my cables play nice (this is made more difficult by my full size AGP card).

When I perform a disk to image, it asks me for source drive then opens a window asking me for save location and image name - the only locations available to me here are my floppy drive ( ) and my CDR.

I will look into the advice you guys have given me and see if it gets me anywhere... I'm at work so I can't test, but I should be able to tell if something sounds like it is a solution.

Let me know if this information changes anything you were thinking, or if it helps you.

I do not even have the option to copy from Raptor to any other drive and not just on my machine, it has been on several customer machines as well.

When I perform a disk to image, it asks me for source drive then opens a window asking me for save location and image name - the only locations available to me here are my floppy drive ( ) and my CDR.

Click to expand...

Exactly what happens everytime I try.

In testing, I have also duplicated my results with ghost 7.5 corporate edition (this is what I am used to working with in the office at SW).

Watch here also knowlestech.

I beleive that when it says image,it means disk image as in cdr or cdrw.So what you see is correct.Does Ghost 7.5 no longer have partition to partition copy? A disk can be copied to another and a partition can be copied to another partition,but cannot be saved as a file on a drive or partition as it completely overwrites the entire disk or partition.
If the drive you want to copy is just one partition it can be saved to it's own partition on the pata drive.It will only need enough space to copy the actual data so it can be smaller then the original partition.So if you want it on the pata and there is other data there allready then you will need two partitions on the ide drive.
I have two raid0 arrays with multiple partitions on each and one ide drive with four partitions that back up all my important raid partitions from both arrays.If you do partition to partition copies,you will need to rename the copy adding 2 to the end (or whatever) so it will not confuse windows with multiple file locations in the registry.
I hope I am making sense.

The local options are disk to disk, disk to image, or disk from image.

I do this all the time. At work, we select disk to image and send the image up to our network ghost server... It saves a series of ghost image files which can be used to reimage another machine or restore certain files from.

When doing this with the ghost server, all of the images are on the same partition...

I'm confused. I don't understand why I would need to write to a dedicated partition, if that is what you are saying?

Disk to image is creating an image file. Whether to be written to a HDD or CDR is irrelevant, as long as the bootable files include how to write to the FS in use. Disk to disk and partition to partition methods may utilize compression or expansion of the partition, but are essentially reformatting the partition while the write takes place.

Since PC DOS and MS DOS do not natively write to NTFS, this is why I'd suspect that disk to image will work using FAT32 partitions. With ghosting to a network server, the file system translation is handled by the OS on the server and not the local imaging utility.

So reformating teh destination drive to fat32 may do the trick?

That would be an easy solution. Thank you very much for all the help so far. I will see what I can do later, still at work.

It's still a theory on my part, but it fits the available data.

It fits very nicely... I will let you know what I find out tonight.

With a little looking I found my old link to a Ghost guide here. I was surprised to find that it includes some information about 2003.I am wishing I had it so I could write these images to dvd.It is pretty comprehinsive but I think you might find your answers there.
You may very well be right about the fat32 file system and being able to write to it and not NTFS to store an image in a location you chose.As I had to create my own NTFS dos bootdisk,that is probably why I cannot write to a folder destination and must write to partitions or cd's instead.Funny that the guide says you can't do what I have been doing all along.Guess if I had read the guide first I would have never managed to do it.

You should be able to split the images into large sections and then burn to DVD. To restore, boot with the Ghost floppys and restore from the DVDs. It should work perfectly. I've done the same procedure with CDRs.

From the guide it looks like Ghost 2003 does write to NTFS, but earlier versions do not.