Norton Ghost 2003 restores entire *drive*, not just partition?

[Matt]

I ran a Notorn Ghost 2003 image restore on a multi-partition drive,
only to find that the one partition I was restoring seems to have been
"extended" to the entire drive.

Is this something that I possibly goofed? ie, I thought I had run the
Ghost backup after making multiple partitions on the drive, but maybe
I was mistaken.

Regardless, can Ghost 2003 take this example winXP onfig:

1 disk
C: = NTFS for WinXP OS (10GB)
D: = NTFS for "data" (10GB)

....and backup C:, then restore the image to C: sometime later all
without touching anything on D:? (This all assumes not partition-size
changes, of course.)

I'm worried that the Ghost restore will "extend" C: to the entire disk
and in the process wipe out D: as well. Very bad in my book.

Anybody done this before?

If Norton can't do this, what about Powerquest's Drive Image, and what
revs if so? Other alternatives?

Thanks for any help,
Matt

 

[Rod Speed]

I ran a Notorn Ghost 2003 image restore on a multi-partition
drive, only to find that the one partition I was restoring seems
to have been "extended" to the entire drive.

Is this something that I possibly goofed?
Yep.

ie, I thought I had run the Ghost backup after making
multiple partitions on the drive, but maybe I was mistaken.

Yeah, the Ghost user interface does leave
quite a bit to be desired in that area.

Regardless, can Ghost 2003 take this example winXP onfig:

1 disk
C: = NTFS for WinXP OS (10GB)
D: = NTFS for "data" (10GB)

...and backup C:, then restore the image to C:
sometime later all without touching anything on D:?

Yes, you just have to specify it properly.
Basically when you specify what to restore
to. You specified to restore to the physical
drive, and you should have specified restore
to just the first partition on that drive.

(This all assumes not partition-size changes, of course.)

I'm worried that the Ghost restore will "extend" C: to
the entire disk and in the process wipe out D: as well.

You can do it like that if you want to, but only if you want to.

Very bad in my book.

Anybody done this before?

Yep. Just be careful when you specify what to restore to.

If Norton can't do this, what about Powerquest's Drive Image,
Yes.

and what revs if so?

All reasonably current ones.

Other alternatives?

TrueImage.

 

[Matt]

Yeah, the Ghost user interface does leave

quite a bit to be desired in that area.

Wow, no joke. I went through the user interaction and think I
discovered what you mean. Ouch. Too bad it wiped out my data
partition (but that's what backups are for...I guess.)

Thanks!
Matt

 

[Will Dormann]

I ran a Notorn Ghost 2003 image restore on a multi-partition drive,
only to find that the one partition I was restoring seems to have been
"extended" to the entire drive.

Is this something that I possibly goofed? ie, I thought I had run the
Ghost backup after making multiple partitions on the drive, but maybe
I was mistaken.

I've had the exact same thing happen! I wanted to restore a single
partition to a multi-partition drive, and it ended up restoring the one
partition, but making it take up the whole drive. In my case, the
partition I was restoring to had been resized just slightly so that it
was just smaller than when I backed up the partition. (but still plenty
large enough to accept the data from the partition I was restoring)
When I went to restore it, it asked me what drive I wanted to restore
to. (Rather than allowing me to select the partition to restore to)
I did check to make sure it was going to do what I wanted, but I guess
the wording and/or interface was a bit ambiguous.

It bit me once again when I was doing a drive-to-drive clone, where both
drives were nearly identical in size. I ended up copying the
destination drive to the source. Ghost listed the drives as "Drive 0"
and "Drive 1" I believe, and due to some BIOS setting the drives were in
actuality the opposite of what was expected.

Granted, in both cases it was probably mostly user error. But I do
think that the UI and/or wording that Ghost uses was also at fault.

I have since switched to Acronis TrueImage, and have never looked back!

-WD

 

[Bob Harris]

GHOST can do either a single partition or a whole drive. If multiple
partition, you can do those one at a time. The only thing you can not do
with a single GHOST execution is backup more than one partition, but less
than the full disk.

I often do exactly what you want, so I know that it works very well.

First, pay attention to the options on the GHOST screen. You want to copy a
partition to an image. If you say disk to image, that is the whole disk,
meaning all partitions.

Next, when restoring the partition image, be aware that GHOST assumes that
you have already created all the partitions you want. This is true is the
physical hard drive has not changed and you are merely recovering from a bad
intall/uninstall of some program. However, if you have a new disk, take a
moment to make partitions, first, then restore one (or more) GHOST images of
partitions later. If the new disk is large, as is often the case, feel free
to create more and/or large partitions. The only limitation when dealing
with partition images is that the new partition is as large or larger than
the partition in the image.

In the case of an image of a whole disk, GHOST will handle the partitions
for you. depending on other options you set it will either make the
partitions the same size as on the original disk or expand them to fill the
whole disk.

I have found that partition images are "safer" than disk images, since it is
easy to misinterpret what GHOST will do with a disk image. Also, avoid
the -IA and -IB options of GHOST; they rarely do what a normal user wants.

 

[DrSardonica]

GHOST can do either a single partition or a whole drive. If multiple
partition, you can do those one at a time. The only thing you can not do
with a single GHOST execution is backup more than one partition, but less
than the full disk.

I often do exactly what you want, so I know that it works very well.

First, pay attention to the options on the GHOST screen. You want to copy a
partition to an image. If you say disk to image, that is the whole disk,
meaning all partitions.

Next, when restoring the partition image, be aware that GHOST assumes that
you have already created all the partitions you want. This is true is the
physical hard drive has not changed and you are merely recovering from a bad
intall/uninstall of some program. However, if you have a new disk, take a
moment to make partitions, first, then restore one (or more) GHOST images of
partitions later. If the new disk is large, as is often the case, feel free
to create more and/or large partitions. The only limitation when dealing
with partition images is that the new partition is as large or larger than
the partition in the image.

In the case of an image of a whole disk, GHOST will handle the partitions
for you. depending on other options you set it will either make the
partitions the same size as on the original disk or expand them to fill the
whole disk.

I have found that partition images are "safer" than disk images, since it is
easy to misinterpret what GHOST will do with a disk image. Also, avoid
the -IA and -IB options of GHOST; they rarely do what a normal user wants.

I've always had good luck with Easy Recovery Professional. My drives are in
NTFS. It will do a delete, format, or raw recovery whether it finds the MFT
or not. If one set of options doesn't work, try another, the "Advanced
Recovery" option seems to work best for the problems I have had.