I read the identically titled thread with interest because I ran into that very error last night. That thread is here, and concludes with a very useful summary by contributor rausdahl:
http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Ghost-14-Error-EA3902DC-Attempt-to-handle-too-many-NTFS/td-p/169971/page/4
I am running into the same problem for a different reason. I've used Windows XP and linux in a dual-boot configuration for the last few years, and used Ghost 14 to back up XP in my preferred starting configuration - all the software I use installed, and all the system settings the way I like them to be. I never had any problems because XP had the first hard drive all to itself, while linux shared a larger second drive with my vfat data partition that I use to keep all of my data for access from either OS. If XP would ever start to slow down, or if I'd uninstalled software I was done using (typically games) and found that it had left undesirable "turds" behind despite the uninstall, I would simply restore my preferred configuration from the ghost image.
I recently purchased a larger hard drive and windows 7 and am now endeavoring to set up a triple-boot configuration: XP, Win7, and linux. The larger drive that used to host linux and the shared data partition is now dedicated to shared data and swap, with the new, much larger drive holding all three OS's. I've been using the linux installer DVD's custom layout feature to create the partitions, and letting it install GRUB to select which OS to boot. I had WinXP and Win7 configured and backed up with ghost. Because ghost 14 won't work on Win7, I backed it up using ghost when I was running on XP. I wasn't sure it would work, but it did seem to. I also had a minimal linux install in place that I intended to overwrite with a full install once I was satisfied with XP and 7. I was just about ready to move on to linux, but decided to verify my XP and 7 checkpoints. I actually had two checkpoints of each.
Checkpoint 1 was installation from media, but never having seen the internet, and had been previously verified by repartitioning from scratch and restoring from Ghost images.
Checkpoint 2 was after letting windows update run to completion, installed adobe reader and flash player, etc. When I did a test restore of XP checkpoint 2, I ran into Error EA3902DC.
After reading this thread, here are what I think the relevant facts are:
* The linux partitioning tool can't create NTFS partitions, only VFAT. It also can't format an NTFS partition back to VFAT, because it crashes trying to instantiate the edit partition dialog. It can only delete an NTFS partition, then create a new one in the free space that remains. I have needed to revert from NTFS in order to start over from a clean slate during the OS installs if they did something I didn't like.
* Windows' installers (XP or 7) will set up very wacky drive lettering if I try to have them create a partition after the installer has seen my data drive and designated it as C:. Unfortunately, the wacky lettering is preserved once the OS has been installed. I've found that it works best to have the VFAT partitions in place for coherent drive lettering, and when running a clean first time windows install, select the target VFAT partition to be installed onto and formatted as NTFS.
* Even though the linux partitioning tool in the fedora 14 installer shows three contiguous partitions and no free space, Ghost's recovery disk does show a small sliver (about 1 MB) of unallocated space at the start of the drive, just below C: Interestingly, the size of this space seems to fluctuate slightly from approximately 900 KB to 1100 KB. I think the size of this sliver depends on the creation / deletion sequencing that I used to work around the edit partition dialog crash and playing musical chairs with my various OS installs.
The third observation is the most relevant. It suggests that even though I'm creating partitions with the same integer number of GB, the partitions are actually not quite the indicated size. I think that if a partition ends up being a hair smaller than what it was when Ghost made its backup, I run into Error EA3902DC:
Three questions:
1. Is Ghost 15 more tolerant of this situation, being able to reorganize the data as necessary to fit onto the destination partition even if the partition is a hair smaller than the backup?
2. Is there a partitioning tool that you would recommend that I use instead? It seems like I need to leave gaps between the partitions to give ghost some breathing room, but I don't have a tool at this time that allows this level of control. I used to have that level of control with partition magic (vintage 1999), but that program's recovery boot floppy doesn't understand modern SATA hard drives. I don't really want to buy something without being able to try it first to make sure it really will do what I need it to. Creating dummy partitions for padding won't work because two dummies between three partitions would require five partition table entries, and the limit is four. I actually can use one dummy at a time if dummy 1 is smaller than dummy 2 so that when I need dummy 2 it won't fit into gap 1, but then I'll be treating my partitions like a stacking puzzle and doing a whole lot of iterations of partition deletion / creation. I'd like to avoid that if I can. :-)
Thanks in advance,
btietz