Norton Ghost won't recognize my Dell hard drives

[fmagwww]

I am trying to use a Norton Ghost image to restore my Dell 490 workstation C drive. I had this done by someone before and they gave me a floppy disc that had a driver on it to be loaded during the boot of the Sumantec Recovery Disk. Unfortunately the floppy seems to be somewhat corrupted and only the .sys file seems to be good. This may be why the instructions on the jacket of the disc don't seem to make the operation work. The guy who gave me the disc wrote the following on the outside:

-- Boot recovery disc

-- F6 to load drivers

-- Select 2nd driver from the top

I do this but Ghost still doesn't find my two internal hard drives. I would go back to him for help, but he is now overseas with the military and completely unavailable to me. I don't know where he got the material that was on the disc, and what I am looking for is where to find the right driver files since mine seem to be corrupt in some way.

Hope someone can help me.

Thanks.

-- Frank Magalhaes

[eyeball]

ok just to clarify.,.. you have a .gho ghost file? and you wish to restore this to your pc but your disc is knackered?

let us know

[Ponch]

Dell 490 workstation

Precision 490 ?

see this

this, the Serial ATA drivers are 2/3 of the page.

Edited May 24, 2007 by Ponch

[fmagwww]

ok just to clarify.,.. you have a .gho ghost file? and you wish to restore this to your pc but your disc is knackered?

let us know

Ghost seems to use a different extension now (my old version did use .gho) and it's .v2i or .iv2i depending on wheher it is the initial image or an incremental image.

Right now my primary drive is fine, but on the chance that what happened before will happen again I want to be prepared, so I was giving it a try (short of actually doing the final step of rewriting the disc) when I found I couldn't even find the drives with the Ghost recovery disc.

-- Frank

[fmagwww]

Dell 490 workstation

Precision 490 ?

see this

this, the Serial ATA drivers are 2/3 of the page.

Thanks for the link; I will give this driver a try. Oh, and yes, it is a Pricision 490 I got last summer.

-- Frank

[fmagwww]

Dell 490 workstation

Precision 490 ?

see this

this, the Serial ATA drivers are 2/3 of the page.

The files in the link you gave me were the same as the ones on my defective floppy, so I put the newly downloaded ones on a new floppy, but I met with no better success than I had with the old floppy. Apparently the useful .sys file was not corrupted on the original floppy even though some of the other files were. At this point I don't know what magic the fellow had who said he used those files when he retrieved my image file and restored the computer a few months ago.

I'm not sure how to proceed from here.

[severach]

http://news.com.com/2110-1001_3-212667.html

http://news.com.com/2100-7350_3-5081273.html

Symantec bought Ghost from Binary Research which uses .gho files then later bought Drive Image from Powerquest which uses .pqi or .v2i files. I run Ghost from DOS and on my Intel platform and SATA drives are readable without a driver. Drive Image is available in Windows which won't need a driver. Since Ghost and Drive Image require 2 drives to do anything I usually pull the drive and put it into a computer that has the backup software and a drive to write it to.

[fmagwww]

http://news.com.com/2110-1001_3-212667.html

http://news.com.com/2100-7350_3-5081273.html

Symantec bought Ghost from Binary Research which uses .gho files then later bought Drive Image from Powerquest which uses .pqi or .v2i files. I run Ghost from DOS and on my Intel platform and SATA drives are readable without a driver. Drive Image is available in Windows which won't need a driver. Since Ghost and Drive Image require 2 drives to do anything I usually pull the drive and put it into a computer that has the backup software and a drive to write it to.

Thanks for your input. I do have to say that when I try to use the drivers I downloaded, Ghost (or the Symantec Recovery Disk) says that Windows already has them when I select them after entering "S" for extra drivers, but the drives are nowhere in evidence when I look for recovery points (or anythin else) when the loading stops. It tells me that there are no recovery points and asks me to browse for some. There are no drives to browse on except the floppy drive (a USB connected one), the four allocated to a four way card reader and the two optical drives as well as some sort of RAM drive. My two hard drives seem to be nowhere in evidence.

I guess I'll have to hassle with Symantec and/or Dell and see what I can come up with.

[spacesurfer]

There's only one real ghost and that's the 2003 version which runs under DOS. This version doesn't require any HDD drivers - it pretty much recognizes all your HDD's and CD/DVD-ROMS.

After this version, I never went to the newer versions. There's hearsay about how 2003 was the most stable ghost using the .gho format and all the newer ones aren't as stable.

[Andromeda43]

There's only one real ghost and that's the 2003 version which runs under DOS. This version doesn't require any HDD drivers - it pretty much recognizes all your HDD's and CD/DVD-ROMS.

After this version, I never went to the newer versions. There's hearsay about how 2003 was the most stable ghost using the .gho format and all the newer ones aren't as stable.

Essentially, that's true and not just hearsay.....BUT.....there are at least four different builds of Ghost 2003 (or so I've been told) and each one has different capabilities as to compatibility with various motherboards and drive types.

For instance the build 754 cannot see drives on AMD 939 and AM2 mobo's, while build 793 can.

I'm currently using both Ghost 2003 build 793 and Ghost 8.2, Build 1331. They look exactly the same on the screen, but have greatly differing capabilities. This latest build is actually the size of an entire floppy disk, so the whole program cannot be run from a single floppy.

I set it up on a 64 meg flash drive and then made a bootable CD off of it.

I'll share that with any legal owner of Ghost.

Ghost will work with SATA drives just as easily as IDE's and will even write to DVD's, flash drives and USB hard drives.

I recently made a Ghost image of my SATA II HD ( C: ) to my new "I/O-Magic" 6 gig flash drive. A little slow....but it worked just fine.

Whatever the mobo sees (in DOS), Ghost 2003 will also see and probably write to as well.

Most new mobos will present a SATA drive to Ghost just like an IDE drive. Likewise any USB drive.

Since I like doing backups from a DOS boot disk and I like being able to clean up my FAT-32 hard drives from batch files on my ghost boot disk, NO other program that I've ever tried even comes close to meeting my requirements.

By deleting all the junk files including my Pagefile.sys before running Ghost, I save about 2 gigs of space in my backup Image File.

Try doing that with any other Backup Imaging program.

After I do a Ghost backup of C:, I verify the backup and then do an immediate Restore of the Backup file.

This re-writes all the data on C: in the same orderly manner in which it was read and entered into the backup image file. This re-write represents the most fabulous Defrag that you could even imagine.

It's basically how I used to defrag the big drives on mainframe computers.

I've helped users worldwide set up their own Ghost Backup routines and they all just love how quick, easy and efficient it is. I can back up my entire C: drive to D: (my second HD partition) in just five minutes with FAST compression.

Cheers!

B)

[spacesurfer]

I think Andromeda43 has a radar for all posts about Ghost.

ImageX beats Ghost though in terms being able to store multiple images in one file while keeping file size small, since there is no duplication of files.