For the third time in 2 years the hard drive in my Dell Inspiron R4010 fatally failed. The other times it failed I was under warranty, sent it in for repair, and restored with Ghost with no issues. This time I am out of warranty and doing things on my own and Ghost is not working.
I initialized the new drive by setting it as an active primary drive formatted with the NTFS filesystem. I installed it into the broken laptop, booted into Ghost, and when I select my Ghost image I see that the target drive appears as "Target Drive Invalid". If I push through anyway and attempt to Ghost I am given "Error EC950019: The current recovery data is invalid".
I found a thread here for Ghost 12 http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Ghost-12-shows-invalid-drive-and-target-drive-when-trying-to/m-p/152687/highlight/true#M13747 but I do not have a system restore disc, and if the hard drive is the issue the system restore disc certainly wouldn't have the driver because this is a different hard drive (the old was a 500GB Toshiba and this is a 750GB Western Digital). Earlier I tried to get a system restore disc from Dell, but once you are out of warranty Dell wants nothing to do with you.
If Ghost is just not going to allow me to recover my contents, is it at least possible to view the contents within a Ghost image so that I can manually copy the files out? Worst case scenerio I would just get a new laptop and it would be good enough just to manually pull the files out and into my new computer.