Norton Ghost... you're dead to me

As a tech, I have used many software applications over the years, some bad, some good. One that I had always liked was Norton Ghost. I used to use it all the time to image drives as backups before OS reinstalls, old content onto new, larger media, and various other activities where I wanted a solid undo in case of catastrophe. The last version I'd used was 2003, and it worked pretty solidly for me. However, that was most recently in 2006 or 2007, as I've been more involved with software than hardware these last few years and have not needed to image any hard disks.

Tuesday I was in the processes of preparing for some OS reinstalling, and thought I'd dust off the old Ghost. My mission was to image the contents of a spare 250GB 2.5" SATA HDD to a file on my 1.5TB 3.5" SATA HDD on my main tower. Once I'd done this, I could image my laptop HDD to the spare HDD, repartition and reformat my laptop HDD, and install Windows 7 (because I no longer want that abomination that is Vista on any of my machines). My main machine didn't have Ghost installed, so I dug up the old 2003 disc and installed it without fail. I hit Live Update, quickly got the response that everything is up to date (which I did find odd), and was ready to image. Seeing as I no longer had a floppy drive nor disks, I just decided to use the Windows interface for this quickie job. For those of you who have never used Ghost, the Windows interface basically sets up the task, and then it reboots your machine to PC-DOS and performs it before returning to Windows... at least, that's how it's supposed to work.

After the reboot, Ghost began to load, but never finished loading. It hung. I wasn't bothered too heavily by this. I figured I'd just image it another way. I powered the machine off and back up, but instead of going to Windows, it loads to PC-DOS. Hey! It gave me options, one of which was return to Windows. This sounded like what I wanted. However, after selecting it, the reboot hung at a blinking white cursor. Rebooting a few times duplicated this result. This is not good. Google!

After thorough searching, I came to find out that this was quite a common problem... in 2004. When you use the Windows interface, Ghost creates a virtual partition and the system will boot from that until Ghost says otherwise. So, wouldn't FDISK /mbr fix this? According to the general consensus, no. The method for repair was to use a Ghost boot floppy, and use the command ghreboot. If that didn't work, you were supposed to use gdisk to manually delete the virtual partition and set the boot partition back to active. My problem lied in the fact that I had no floppy drive, nor floppies. My first instinct was to make a boot CD, but the straightforward process to do this using Ghost somehow still requires a floppy disk. Wonderful...

What I ended up doing was creating a virtual floppy disk for Ghost to write a boot disk to, and then copying that data to a USB flash drive and making it bootable. I figured I was on the gravy train with biscuit wheels at that point. I booted to PC-DOS with my flash drive, tried ghreboot... no improvement. So, I ran gdisk. Upon listing the partitions, no virtual partition was there. I went ahead and set my boot partition active again, and went ahead and rebooted. Imagine my excitement when I saw the XP loading screen...

Imagine my horror when it blue screened with a STOP: c000021a error when it tried to load the Welcome screen. Rebooting reproduced the error. I booted the Recovery Console and ran fixmbr. Error remained. My next move was to repair install XP. The repair install seemed to be going fine until, STOP: c000021a. Well... thanks for destroying this partition, Ghost. I really appreciate that. I conceded that I just needed to reinstall the OS, but I wanted to recover the data on that drive. Seeing as I had a brand spanking new Ghost boot flash drive, and knowing that working from a boot disk was tried and true, I figured I'd image the affected drive to that spare drive, thus letting Ghost redeem itself to an extent. 16 hours later, Ghost finished working. I shut off the machine, pulled the spare drive, put it in an enclosure, and plugged the enclosure's USB into the laptop... just to discover that the drive was blank. Ghost had spent 16 hours doing nothing... nothing... 16 hours... blank disk... yeah... f*** you, Norton.
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Big Cray: Accept no Substitute