I'm an independent pc consultant and have been using and recommending Ghost for 2-3 years. It's great to be a hero when a HD goes bad or windows goes corrupt. I'm finished with my current crises, but it would be great if you could help me before the next one.
I've been favoring Seagate for internal C: drives for the last couple years but have had Seagate HD's go bad at a 50% rate in the last 6-9 months and can no longer trust them. I decided to give Hitachi a try but this week found that if I restored a verified image to an Hitachi 250gb IDE HD, it wouldn't boot to normal mode. It booted to safe mode OK and I turned off all services & startup items but it still wouldn't boot normally. I tried fdisk /mbr, fixboot, fixmbr etc as well a diff Hitachi drive etc. Finally I restored the same image in the same way to a used 80gb Maxtor IDE HD that I had laying around and it worked immediately.
I'm sure the admin will be tempted to help solve the problem described above, but please believe me that once I saw that the Maxtor 80gb was the answer I continued testing and have spent hours and days over the years getting really good with Ghost. I can give you the pc model etc, but I'm convinced that I've controlled for other issues and that the brand of hard drive really does make a difference.
I should also mention that the Seagate HD was installed just 3 months ago and I used Ghost image backup and restore to replace a smaller HD and it worked perfectly. But the Seagate's keep failing.
I looked thru all my Ghost notes and found that I had the same issue 18 months ago and a WD HD wouldn't boot after image restore but when I restored to a Maxtor in exactly the same way, it worked fine. At that time, I just blew it off, but now I have enuf customers using Ghost that I need to stock HD's and know that they will boot after I restore to them.
So really the only question I'm asking is if you have any data that shows which HD brands show good results after a restore and which brands do not?
Thanks,
Sam