Ghost not showing my C: drive in "Create New Backup"

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1

I've got a weird problem. I've got Ghost 15 on my laptop, and I had it set up to backup to a portable USB drive. I went about 6 months without backing up (I wasn't using the laptop much).

 

Now, when I try to run the "My Computer" backup, the Progress and Performance Monitor pops up, and the progress bar goes from 0% to 100% in about 2 seconds, and it says it completed, but it doesn't actually backup anything.

 

So... I tried deleting that backup job and creating a new one. The problem is: when I go to create the new backup, the drives on my laptop aren't shown. All it shows is the USB drive.

 

I've tried uninstalling and re-installing Ghost 15 (and running LiveUpdate), but the problem persists. Ideas?

2
jemenake wrote:

I've got a weird problem. I've got Ghost 15 on my laptop, and I had it set up to backup to a portable USB drive. I went about 6 months without backing up (I wasn't using the laptop much).

 

Now, when I try to run the "My Computer" backup, the Progress and Performance Monitor pops up, and the progress bar goes from 0% to 100% in about 2 seconds, and it says it completed, but it doesn't actually backup anything.

 

So... I tried deleting that backup job and creating a new one. The problem is: when I go to create the new backup, the drives on my laptop aren't shown. All it shows is the USB drive.

 

I've tried uninstalling and re-installing Ghost 15 (and running LiveUpdate), but the problem persists. Ideas?

Hi jemenake,

To start with if you could post a Disk management pic that will give us some idea of your disk arrangement.

Make sure that the HDDs are "online" in disk management  and according to what you say you are running incremental backups.

Try a "One Time Backup" from the Tasks menu to see what that does.

To delete a backup job properly you will need to stop the Ghost service first and then delete the necessary files.

 

Deric

3

One-Time Backup also only showed the USB drive.

 

I'm attaching a screenshot of the Disk Management screen, the One-Time Backup screen, and also the output of partinfo.txt.

 

The disk is partitioned with about 5 partitions:

- An NTFS for Windows 7 (which is also the system drive)

- An NTFS named "Shared" for other stuff.

- Two ext3/ext4 partitions with Linux

- One Linux swap partition

 

DiskMgmt.png

 

OneTimeBackup.png

4

Try adding drive letters to the primary drives that are showing no drive letters.

I am not sure what effect the Linux O/Ss have on the C:drive.

Is it possible to save the data on the primary partitions and delete them so that C: drive is just the one drive without partitions.

If you tick show hidden drives what does that do, can you see the C: drive then?

If DaveH or BrianK could have a look at Partinfo to see what they think.

 

Deric

5

jemenake,

 

Your Disk Management shows the "bug".

 

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/vista/vista-diskmgmt-bug.shtml

 

Your partinfo looks a mess. Can you delete logical partitions that aren't needed.

6
Brian_K wrote:

jemenake,

 

Your Disk Management shows the "bug".

 

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/vista/vista-diskmgmt-bug.shtml

 

Your partinfo looks a mess. Can you delete logical partitions that aren't needed.

 

The Vista/Win7 bug is merely one of Windows mis-identifying logical partitions as primary. Notice that, even with the bug, Disk Managment still sees my C: drive... yet Ghost doesn't. Everything else on my PC sees the drive (including things which use Shadow Copy, like Windows 7 Backup).

 

I'm not sure what about my partinfo you consider a "mess". I've got may GB of unused space because I don't know which partitions I might want to grow in the future, so I leave unused space between them. There are a few places where there are small gaps of unused space to ensure that partitions start at the beginning of a cylinder. And, even though it's not illegal to have partitions listed in a different order in the table than they are on the disk, I think all of mine are in order, anyway.

 

Of course, we're avoiding the question of why Ghost is taking it upon itself to bypass Windows and concern itself with partition table entries, anyway.

7

Actually, if you wanted cylinder alignment you should have done that for all the partitions.

It's the mixture of sector and cylinder alignments that make it look like a mess to me.  But thats just my opinion.

It's like building a house with half the people using metric plans and half US standard, your going to end up with a lot of uneven gaps and cracks.

I only looked at it a few minutes but I can guess at what partitions were made by windows and the ones made by something else.

 

There is something odd about that large unallocated space in the extended partition.

I would be willing to guess that is when Ghost stopped working, either when the swap partition was made or whatever was in that unallocated space deleted or changed.

 

Sorry I don't have more time to look over it now.

Dave

8
jemenake wrote:

 we're avoiding the question of why Ghost is taking it upon itself to bypass Windows and concern itself with partition table entries,

Joe, unfortunately Ghost is sensitive to partinfo anomalies and may not see any partitions on a drive with "issues". Your Extended Primary Parttition is not aligned on either a 2048 sector or a cylinder boundary. The H: logical partition starting sector is outside of the extended partition and inside the Win7 partition. The contained logical partitions are reported as "not in sequential order" which Ghost doesn't seem to like either. On the other hand, the C: drive is correctly aligned even though the H: drive starts inside it. Ghost especially doesn't like overlapping partitions.

 

So why doesn't Ghost like the above when other imaging apps don't mind? I don't know.

9

I think the answer is what I tried to say in message 4, delete the partitions and get down to a basic drive to clean it up and that is my opinion.

Partinfo is a bit beyond me and that is why I suggested Dave and Brian had a look at it because my level of expertise is lacking somewhat in that respect, so I leave that to the experts to advise.

 

Deric 

10

Joe, if you fix the partition overlap and you might not have to delete any partitions to see the C: drive in Ghost. Fingers crossed.

11
Brian_K wrote:

Joe, if you fix the partition overlap and you might not have to delete any partitions to see the C: drive in Ghost. Fingers crossed.

I'll give that a shot. The partition table is actually the result of multiple partition tools. I used to use Partition Magic, but I've had that destroy far too many partitions after it would crash in the middle of a resize/move. So, I used gparted (on Linux) for a while, but that isn't very clever about NTFS/FAT partitions in that it doesn't just move files *within* the partition to clear off space to effect the move/resize with a minimum of disk activity; it just moves every sector.

 

I'm currently using Acronis Disk Director, and that seems to be pretty reliable. Right now, I'm backing up the H: drive, so I can remove that, entirely, and see if that eliminates the overlap issue.

12

Joe,

 

The overlap is about 5000 sectors, 2.5 MB. I suggest you resize (from a boot disk) the C: drive smaller by 10 MB. Does that make Ghost work?

13

Apologies. My eyes saw numbers that don't exist. There is no overlap.

14

The second Linus partition is messed up.  The third partition showing in disk management.

If you look in the first section that shows the geometry it is somehow listed last.

Directly above the warning: WARNING: Logical partition entries are not in sequential order.

 

But if you look at the section directly below, it shows it in the correct physical location but there is an odd unallocated space of 1809 sectors that is not divisible by 63 or 2048.  Following that partition is another oddball at 447 sectors.

 

I don't know how forgiving Linux is about bootting to different alignments but I don't see how you could possibly restore the whole system onto a new drive without changing all the alignments.  I don't even think windows would allow you to make a partition boundry between a sector and a cylinder.

But thats a moot point because Ghost doesn't support ext4.

 

When I first saw the partinfo the first thing that came to mind was acronis disk director.

 

Dave

15
DaveH wrote:

 

When I first saw the partinfo the first thing that came to mind was acronis disk director.

 

Yes, ADD is notorious for creating weird logical partitions.

16

I can't figure out a single good reason why it would do that.

Unless it is to ensure that only a certain image program will work with them.

 

 

17
DaveH wrote:

The second Linus partition is messed up.  The third partition showing in disk management.

If you look in the first section that shows the geometry it is somehow listed last.

Well, several of the Linux partition tools let you do this. The reason being that you'd tell it to load partitions based upon what partition number they were. So, if you had a drive that looked like this:

 

| #1 Windows | Free Space | #2 Ubuntu | #3 Linux swap area |

 

then your boot-manager would be configured to try to boot the Linux kernel from partition #2. If you then created a new partition and the partitions were re-numbered, then, when you tried to boot Linux, the boot-manager would be looking for the Linux kernel on partition #2... which is now the number of the new partition you just created.

 

So, most linux tools would avoid changing the numbering of any existing partitions.

 

It's kind of a moot point, nowadays, because the boot loaders and the Linux kernel now use UUID filesystem ID numbers, so, the correct partition will get found, no matter what number it is.

 

Anyway, just to get with the times, I backed up the Shared partition, then used the linux fdisk tool to re-order the remaining partition numbers. I also used the linux gparted tool to move all of the partitions to 1MB boundaries. Then, used Windows 7 to re-create the Shared partition. So, everything should be aligned on 1MB boundaries, there should be no overlap, and... surprise, surprise, Ghost sees the partitions, again, and it backed them up. 

 

Yay! Thanks for all your help, guys!

18

Good work, I'm glad you fixed it.

2048 sectors is 1MB. so you have everything aligned properly now, expecially if you choose to upgrade to a SSD or advanced format drive.

 

I reccomend you trash disk director and stick with windows or gparted with that setting.

Dave