I have an external hard drive, that I use Norton Ghost ver 14 to back up my internal hard drives. The internal hard drives are shown as drive "C:\" and HP_Recovery partition as drive "D:\". When I use "My Computer" to view the drives, it shows my external drive as "H:\". For some reason, in the Ghost program, it shows the backup destination as drive "G:\". "My Computer" does not even show a drive "G:\". In "Control Panel" the Disk Management only shows Disk 0 as drives "C:\" and "D:\", and Disk 1 as drive "H:\". Again no drive "G:\".
Does Ghost create and hide a drive letter? When I am in the Ghost program, the Back Up Destination shows a chart of drive "G:\" with so much backup data, other used space and free space. If I click on the "TOOLS" option and then click on "Manage Backup Destination", it shows drive "G:\" but there are no recovery points sets. If I change to drive "H:\", all my recovery points sets show up. If I leave that screen and go back to it, it defaults to drive "G:\" again.
Where did this drive "G:\" come from? Did I mess something up during the setup program? How can I get back to one drive showing up? If I have to, I don't mind erasing all data points and starting over.. If I can get the drive letters corrected.
PC_confused,
If you had a flash drive and the external HD connected together that may have created a G: drive letter for the external HD. No matter. You can get all your drive letters back to square one by deleting all the subkeys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. Always connect the external HD before connecting a flash drive otherwise drive letters can change.
When you reboot the extraneous drive letters will be gone. Your drive letters will be sequential. C, D, E, F etc
Backup with Ghost before deleting the subkeys.
Brian_K,
Thanks for the quick reply. I followed your Registry directions down to MountedDevices. There I found...
Default
16 lines of \??\Volume{whole lot of numbers and letters} Reg_Binary.. Data - whole lot more
letters and numbers
in pairs...also it shows
\DosDrives\ C:\ through M:\.
Your instruction is to let Ghost back up everything then delete all of these entries???
Just wanting to make sure.. I'm not comfortable working inside the registry... Those letters and numbers mean something to someone, but don't mean anything to me..
It does look frightening. When you try to delete the lot you will be told the default key can't be deleted. Accept this and they will all be gone (except for the default). When Windows reboots it re-creates these partition signatures, except for the duplicatated ones. See this site for the reasons. I know you aren't cloning but the page describes the process. See Method #2
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm#method2
If there are incorrect job letters remaining in Ghost after the reboot, simply delete them. Delete and recreate your jobs. All recovery points that you have are still usable but as your external HD probably will have a different drive letter, the Ghost recovery CD may not automatically find them. So you will need to do this in the recovery environment ...
in the "View by" (drop down arrow) choose Filename
click Browse
double click Computer
navigate to the folder containing your Recovery points
select the relevant Recovery point (Baseline or incremental)
click Open
Any questions?
Edit.... I just tried the delete process again. You are told the default key can't be deleted after all other keys are deleted.
Message Edited by Brian_K on 07-04-2009 07:19 AM
Brian_K, I tried as you suggested. I deleted all of those entries in “Mounted Devices”, rebooted and deleted all of the Ghost backups, and started new ones. Now it looks like Ghost is seeing the correct drive. After I deleted all 16 of those entries, and rebooted, 9 of them came back? Also for some reason, my NIS 2009 icon showed a red circle on it with an exclamation mark on it. It took three reboots, to clear that red circle. I don’t know what that was all about, but it looks okay now. Thanks for the information.
If I am understanding this thread correctly, once Ghost has gotten the wrong drive letter associated with your default backup location, you have to loose all previous backups all because Ghost has changed it's internal reference to use use the old drive letter and this can not be corrected?
This really frustrates me as I backed up using Ghost data from old versions to Drive Letter G. At some point windows got them screwed up and changed them to H. Then Ghost seems to have changed iternally to H. I used the Disk Management snap-in to switch back to G but I can't get Norton Ghost to use G, so I have to delete all of my previous backups????? I have backups of other partitions that are no longer available, since Ghost is looking for the information about them on H --- Aaargh. Everytime Windows gets confused about the drive lettters, I loose ALL Ghost backups??? Unlike the author of the original question, I am not willing to delete all of my Ghost backups just to get my drive letters lined up. I did that already. My problem is getting Ghost to give me access to the Ghost backup files and data!!
This is not a solution, it is a copout!
Nerdinmich wrote:
This is not a solution, it is a copout!
Nerdinmich,
You misunderstand. You don't lose any backups. Not one. I think the other poster meant he recreated the backup jobs. A one minute job.
I apologize if I sound like a broken record. My problem is not that the drive letters in Windows are broken, they are not. I did perform your Registry edit to verify and this has NOT fixed my problem.
My problem is that Ghost can't use the entries it displays as recovery points in for example the Explore Recovery Point section, because when I Open them the product is still trying to access a drive letter that no longer exists. Here is the detailed message -
-Info 6C8F1C25: Cannot validate the recovery point location for file 'H:\Norton Ghost Backups\C_Drive148.v2i'.
--Error EC8F1B76: H:\Norton Ghost Backups\ is not a local pathname (for example, C:\).
As a result Ghost does not see the recovery points, so I can't use Optimize Recovery Point Storage either. Basically I can define a new back up and start with a new complete recovery point, but as far as I can tell my old backups are just a backup file I have to manually access, manage and delete myself.
Please if I am wrong help me fix this. I am not looking forward to the multiple hours a new backup will take. I may have to delete a very old base recovery point just to have room for the new set, which means I loose a lot of historical copies of things!
I think it does mean you have to manage your present recovery points manually. But future recovery points should be managed by Ghost.
I manage all my recovery point manually. I totally ignore the Ghost management features. When I want to delete a recovery point, I delete it from Windows Explorer.