Norton Ghost 2003 HDD size limits?

[jds]

@jds:

That is indeed strange. In all the years I've used Ghost I've never had to use the -FNI switch. My first guess was that you have one of those new Advanced Format HDDs but a quick search showed that on the contrary, you have an older WDC Caviar HDD. It would be interesting to see if switching the HDD to the primary IDE port makes any difference. I also wonder if there's some sort of quirky disk geometry setup misconfiguration or related type thing going on. Web searches on the -FNI switch show that it's often associated with SATA HDDs but I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply in this case.

Well, there's no disk geometry misconfiguration, as the 15079 errors occurred randomly during each attempt at saving a partition image. In other words, different files were flagged as having a smaller size than reported, each time an attempt was made. Also, the drive tested fine with every test utility I could find and performed/behaved perfectly normally.

Anyway, I've now substituted a slightly larger drive for the WDC, in the same secondary master position. It doesn't exhibit any 15079 errors, random or otherwise. So it seems this issue was some obscure compatibility issue between Ghost and this particular drive. So if you ever encounter similar random "15079 (size less than reported)" errors, and you don't find any problems with the drive, the solution is the "-FNI" command line switch.

Joe.

Edited March 23, 2012 by jds