Ghost 14 Recovery Fails with Error EA3902DC

Ghost 14 has appeared to be backing up my hard drive no problem for the last couple of years. Occasionally I have successfully restored files from the image with no problem. Since I have just purchased a second hard drive which I intend to use for photos and video storage I thought it would be a good idea to use it to see if I could do a complete system recovery from my Ghost backup drive. I removed my existing 250GB system drive and installed the new 320GB drive in its place then launched the Norton Recovery CD.  After 8 hours and 4 recovery attempts I'm frustrated and having serious doubts about Ghost 14. In all cases the recovery was almost complete then an Error EA3902DC: Attempt to handle too many NTFS attributes occurred. Just before the error I saw progress update messages, Checking entries in MFT; Resizing file system and finally Scanning kernel symbolic links. Then the error message appeared. Can anyone suggest what is going wrong here? I have now reinstalled my original system drive but my confidence in Ghost 14 is seriously shaken.

Mike

Did you recover the image onto a blank drive or did you try to create a partition first?

Dave

Hi DaveH,

 

This was a brand new out of the bag Western Digital SATA drive. After each attempt to do a recovery I "cleaned" the drive using the "clean" command in windows Diskpart program.

Mike

The thought just crossed my mind; how many other Ghost 14 owners are out there feeling very confident, like I was, that Ghost was backing up their system and in the event of a catastrophic hard drive failure they would purchase a new hard drive, do a recovery to it and bingo they're back in business? That may not be the case! There certainly is value in fully checking out the recovery side of your backup software. It might even be worth purchasing a new hard drive to check a recovery works ok on your system; I believe I paid less for the 320GB drive I just purchased than the Norton Ghost 14 software.

 

It will work, I'm sure we are just doing something wrong. 

The reason why I asked if you were making partitions was because I thought that error was caused by running out of space on the destination drive.

If you are doing the restore onto an empty drive that would not be the case.

 

On another topic you mentioned a PCIE adapter, your not using that now are you?

Do you have the drive attached directly to the SATA port of the motherboard and does the system BIOS properly recognise it as 320GB?

 

Dave

Hi DaveH,

 

The PCI   SATA card wasn't installed when I attempted the recoveries. The blank new drive was installed directly in place of the existing system C: drive and yes the BIOS recognized it correctly.

 

I don't want to bash Norton here; it's a difficult job I'm sure to write software that works reliably on all platforms. The problem with backup software is that in so many instances the complete system recovery function remains untested by the user until they need it. Only then do you find out whether it works or not. I have used some "free" backup software in the past to do successful bootable recoveries on another computer. I have just downloaded it and created a full image backup which I will try recovering to the new drive hopefully tonight. If it works successfully I won't hesitate to purchase it and replace my Ghost 14. I simply don't have time these days to try endless settings etc to see if I can get software to function correctly.

 

Thanks for your replies.

Mke