Last night, an automatic update "bricked" my new win7 computer. (Someone else built it, and I forgot to disable automatic updates.)
I have nightly Ghost 15 backups on an eSATA external drive, but I haven't made a custom recover disk yet.
What do you advise?
Note I researched to find that the eSATA drive should be supported. I found an ISO image of the SRD at the "Download Now" button in the middle of the page at https://www-secure.symantec.com/norton-support/jsp/help-solutions.jsp?docid=20091016094409EN&lg=english&ct=united+states&product=home&version=1&pvid=f-home&entsrc=redirect_pubweb .
I burned the CD and booted from it. While the program was SEARCHING for recovery points, I got the dreaded exception unknown exception error.
Per http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/unknown-exception-running-Ghost-15-SRD/m-p/183370/highlight/true#M17304 I researched then disabled the Disable Execution Bit in my bios. No help.
Per http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Ghost-15-0-SRD-will-not-work-with-my-SATA-6-0-Gb-s-WD/td-p/584958/highlight/true I noticed that I appear to have a Marvell driver for the SATA (eSATA) on my brand new ASUS motherboard.
Somewhere I read a post suggesting that the Disable Execution Bit might cause the program to run out of memory for some reason. Thinking of memory, and thinking of Marvell (non-windows) driver, I tried something that WORKED...
I have SIX internal SATA drives plus ONE external eSATA drive, including a dozen or more partitions. "Search?" I said to myself. "Out of memory?" I said to myself. I unplugged four of the internal drives, leaving only the OS disk and, just in case, another disk with the System Reserved partition on it. (I may have the wrong name for that partition; I'm drawing from memory right now. Also, the fact that it's on a different disk from the OS (boot?) disk is likely because someone else built the computer, not me.)
Having removed all those other disks and their associated partitions, I booted the Ghost 15 SRD again. The search didn't fail. I'm currently 30% through restoring my computer. Hopefully it will finish with success.
PLEASE HELP ME: I would like to post to the end of each of the above referenced threads, so that anyone else searching for help might come to my post here, where they may learn that removing disks helps them. Or where they may learn that this exception could generally be an out-of-memory problem. However, I don't see a "reply" button on those posts. Perhaps I don't have enough permission. If you do, can you please post to the end of those, referring to this one or otherwise adding the suggestion? Thanks very much.
By the way, I didn't need to do any of the WinPE 3.0 stuff, as implied possibly necessary for my ASUS motherboard with Marvell SATA driver. I just used the ISO as is. I don't know if that ISO as is may have been WinPE 3.0. Didn't look.
After a thread hasn't had any activity for a while, it becomes locked. I guess this is both good and bad. It keeps someone from replying to an ancient thread after the original poster may be long gone. It would be nice to be able to put a resolution to an unsolved problem. What you could do is add tags to your post and then when someone searches the forum,, it will get a hit if it has the keyword.