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.
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.
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.
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.