Norton ghost problem?

I tried to back-up my hard drive to an external drive using Norton Ghost 2003: the program indicated that it would reboot in DOS, copy the image of my hard drive to a ghost file on the external drive, then reboot back to Windows when it was finished. However, upon reboot I got the sinister missing operating system message... and that's it. Ditto when I reboot. I checked the BIOS settings to make sure it was going to HDD0... I can use the ghost boot floppy to get going in PC-DOS and make the drive image manually, but still no Windows :\ ... Coincidence? Has anybody seen ghost do this? Karmic backlash?

 

The main issue I had when trying to copy a ghost image to an external hard drive was making the external hard drive accessible in DOS. I use a boot disk with DUSE. That gives me a Ghost boot disk with DOS USB drivers. There is some information on doing that here. If I boot with that, Ghost can see both the internal and external hard drive.

 

Well, I've made my image already (although the MBR on that image isn't going to be very useful in restoring my drive) and I inspected the Radified guide, but inability to boot to windows is not one of the normal functions of using ghost, so it is not discussed in the guide... I think I may have just been very unlucky in that my MBR got corrupted the boot before I was going to backup my drive! I'm going to try and repair the boot files w/ an XP disk.

 

Post Script

Yes, as it turns out, my HDD decided to die on the reboot to ghost.exe in pc-dos. I managed to use my ghost boot floppy to make an image of the drive onto (17) CDs, reinstalled XP anew on a new HDD, and then eventually recovered my important files from the image restored to another partition on the new drive. I even managed to recover the old drive by using the WD manufacturer utility to write 0's to the disk and then reformatted it. Now it's my disk for storing ghost images before I have a crisis!