Ghost 15 doesn't recognize my Western Digital MyBook 3TB external USB 3.0 drive

I'm an official Norton Ghost Newbie but reasonably experienced in the PC and Windows world.  I just purshased Ghost 15 on-line to use to create drive copies for backup purposes and I can't seem to get Ghost to recognize my new Western Digital MyBook 3TB drive as an external drive for recording the Ghost output files.

 

My basic setup is an "old" PC (AMD Athlon 64-bit based) that has two physical internal drives.  Set up to dual boot to Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and Windows XP SP3.  I use mostly the Win 7 side.  The physical drives are each Seagate 1TB .  One is partitioned to a 750 GB partition and a 250GB (the Win XP) partition.  I have two external drives attached to an aftermarket USB 3.0 port.  One is the WD MyBook, the other is a Seagate 1.5 TB in a NexStar 3 housing.  Ghost can see the NexStar device but not the MyBook.

 

There were three drivers identified as incompatible during the installation procedure for Ghost:

The following devices do not have drivers in the Symantec Recovery Disk.

 

WAN Miniport (IKEv2)

Silicon Image SiI 3132 SoftRaid 5 Controller

PPPoP WAN Adapter

 

Based on the details provided (see the attached Word doc for the messages from the installation process), these are all 64-bit drivers and incompatible with Ghost.  I am assuming that the SoftRaid device is the driver for the MyBook and thus is not visible to Ghost. 

 

Does anyone have any good ideas for how I can set up Ghost to recognize the My Book while I am running the Windows 7 64-bit OS?

 

Thanks.

 

- Ron Murch -

 

Hi rmurch,

Try and partition the external drive to 2 and 1 TB because Ghost 15 can't "see" a 3 TB drive (yet).

 

Deric 

Ron,

 

Have you tried plugging it into a USB 2 port with a USB 2 cable?

Thnaks for this idea.  I haven't tried this yet.  I'll give it a whirl.  However, part of the value of USB 3 is the transfer speed - especially for backups.  :-)

 

- Ron -

 

Hi Deric:

 

Part of the reason I got the 3TB drive is to have a larger space without a partition.  Unfortunately, I didn't think to ask about compatibility with Ghost.  I just figured since USB 3 had been out for a couple of years and the 3TB drives have been around for about a year, Symantec would have updated Ghost to accomodate that technology.  Also, the 64-bit OS has been around for long enough that the drivers should work, but I still got those three errors.  The system I'm running on is actually about 6 years old but I've updated some components and it's hard to keep track of which ones have solid 64-bit drivers.

 

Thanks for your tip, though.  I may try that if all else fails to help.

 

- Ron -

Hi Ron,

I am certain that Ghost 15 supports upto 2 TB external drives,

we will have to wait for the next version of Ghost which I am sure will support external USB3 drives in excess of 3TB.

 

 

Deric

The problem is with the 3.0 usb setup. You will need to reformat the wd drive using western digital format software. When you reformat the drive choose vista or better. It won't work if you choose XP. You can download the wd software from the wd website to format the drive. Don't put any other WD software on the drive. It should work from the getgo after formatting. If your drive is not recognized after that you may have to go into disk management and assign a drive letter the 1st time you boot after the format?

KEG

 My system is dell 64bit. External WD 4TB AND WD 3TB External drive. win 7 64bit. No partitioning required. Norton Ghost 15 works fine.

Without reading all the post 3 TB rings alarm bells with me, do a partition 2 tb and a 1 tb see if Ghost can see it then.

 

Deric


KEGC33 wrote:

The problem is with the 3.0 usb setup. You will need to reformat the wd drive using western digital format software. When you reformat the drive choose vista or better. It won't work if you choose XP. You can download the wd software from the wd website to format the drive. Don't put any other WD software on the drive. It should work from the getgo after formatting. If your drive is not recognized after that you may have to go into disk management and assign a drive letter the 1st time you boot after the format?

KEG

 My system is dell 64bit. External WD 4TB AND WD 3TB External drive. win 7 64bit. No partitioning required. Norton Ghost 15 works fine.


But most importantly, can you see the recovery points from the SRD (Symantec Recovery Disc)? Since it is based on Vista, I'll bet not.

The format option with wd formatter is: XP or Vista or Better. Which includes win 7 by definintion!

It works!!

 


KEGC33 wrote: No partitioning required.

KEGC33,

 

Nice post. I assume you mean "no extra partitions" as there is already a partition present on the external HD.

Yes. The problem I'm still having is you can't restore from SRD or from Norton Ghost on C drive. You have to open the backup file directly from the backup file on the external drive to recover files or drive? I'm working on that! Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Keg

Keg,

 

I don't understand what you mean.

Ok. I contacted Norton Ghost. It seems that SRD and Norton Ghost 15 does not recover correctly on drives larger than 2TB!!  I have recovered files from my external 4tb drive by going to that drive opening the backup files directly. I have not tried a full restore. I'm going to use Windows 7 image backup for that.

Norton is working on a fix for the 3 and 4 tb drive problem. Norton is not the only one with  problems backing up 3.0 usb large drives. Watch out Backup Exec claims compatable with 3.0 usb but only on 2.0 speed. Who has the fix. We can make money!

Keg

 

Keg,

 

I don't have a HD larger than 2 TB.

 

Are you saying that if the external HD is 3 TB and it contains an image of the OS, that image can't be restored to a 1 TB HD?

Possibly using  ghost 15. I haven't tried a full restore from my wd 4tb drive. Since ghost is no fully functional I don't trust it. It works for individual files. At least the one I tested. If you are using win7.  I would use win 7 image "backup and restore". I have recovered my whole system from my 4tb wd drive with no problem.

keg

 

 


KEGC33 wrote:

 I have recovered my whole system from my 4tb wd drive with no problem.

 


Let me pin you down. You restored an image contained on a 4 TB HD to your System drive. You did this from the SRD and the System drive ( containing Win7) was smaller than 2 TB. Is that correct?

No. I used Microsoft backup and restore software for win7. Using that software I saved an image file on my exterior 4tb wd drive. I used the same program to recover my c: drive. It took less than 2 hours to recover over 500 gigs of files. My C drive on computer is 1tb. I'm fairly sure you could do the same with ghost by directly opening it on my 4tb drive. But I'm not going to attempt a 500 gig restore to test it out!