Norton Ghost 2003 image "created" new partion table

[Gerhard]

Interesting Symantec feature

I updated my Drive Image 6 to Symantec Ghost 2003 as I was told Ghost
should be nicer and better.

It seemed to be simpler to create an image than with DriveImage.
So I made an image from my partition C: (My drive has 4 partitions and
everything had been working well, till I crashed my XP pro.
(DriveImage needed 5 CD's for imaging C: with Ghost 7! Drive Image is
able to pack.)

This should be no disaster I thought, as I had my new Norton image
present.
So I booted with the image and Ghost started with telling me now to
overwrite all files.
I accepted.
After rebooting Windows started correct.
Every thing was fine.
Then I tried to start one program and Windows complained about not
finding the xxx.exe file.
I tried some others, the same.
All my programs hade been saved on a different partition than stand c:
I checked for the drives. There was only ONE left.
I installed PartitionMagic and checked the partitions.
Ghost altered the partition table to only one.
I was not able to recover the old partition table, as the rescue disks
from Norton utilities only checked for viruses.

So I had to install my WHOLE software NEW.

So now after 4 night shifts I'm able to write this.
I think I will delete everything called Symantec.

Good luck with Symantec software!

Gerhard

 

[Will Dormann]

So now after 4 night shifts I'm able to write this.
I think I will delete everything called Symantec.

Good luck with Symantec software!

I've ditched Ghost myself too. It seems to work "OK", but there are
some situations where it will clobber your data too easily. I think it
comes down to not clearly enough explaining what it's about to do before
it's too late.

It bit me once when cloning a drive to another one, and overwrote the
source drive with the target. (instead of vice-versa) I think it
possibly had to do with listing the drives by some BIOS setting as
opposed to the physical master/slave setting. The other time was
when I was restoring a single partition to a drive that had three. For
some reason it seemed to think that the target partition wasn't large
enough, so it restored the single partition to the drive, expanding it
so that it took up all of the available space of the drive.

I'm sure in both cases, the botch is my fault in some way or another.
But with Ghost, it made it all too easy to make a mistake.

I've since switched to Acronis TrueImage and I love it. Native support
for Linux partitions, USB drives, Windows "Network Neighborhood", and
network backups without needing to reboot into a dedicated "listener"
program until the backup is complete.


-WD