My Norton Ghost 15 experience

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1

Hi,

 

So I decided to use Norton Ghost 15 today to clone my work disk to an ssd drive.

I have a windows 7 x64 machine and I admit my partition setup is not the easiest (partinfo attached). I also have GRUB (but so do a million other people !).

 

For a user that justs wants to copy/resize certain partitions & the mbr from one disc to another it surely installed a lot of stuff. And after all that it refused to work. ("System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException" error message after selecting "Unable to determine status"). This is despite having installed SP1.

 

Unable to really do anything I decided to uninstall it. And so I did through the windows control panel. The uninstall completed successfully and prompted me to restart. BUT, things don't end there...

 

Upon restart I noticed my cd rom and dvd rom drives no longer appeared under "My computer". In the device manager it said that Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device.

I tried to uninstall the cdrom drivers and re-install them but the problem persisted.

Then I found this post from microsoft : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314060

In short it says to check the upperfilter and lowerfilter keys in this registry location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318

After checking the registry, I found an Upper filter which was causing the issue: GEARAspiWDM

Having deleted the UpperFilter key containing this, I uninstalled the cd rom drivers and let windows auto detect it again. This time, it recognised the drive correctly and could see it again.

Looking deeper into the registry, I found various remains of Norton, things that should have been removed, such as the GEARAspi service. Apparently the root issue was an incomplete uninstall of Norton Ghost (although the uninstaller did not report any errors)

Running the Norton Removal tool completed the process and everything was back to normal.

I am quite dissapointed by this and honestly it wasted 2 hours of my day. Not because Ghost did not work with my system but because it left it in a sorry state after uninstall ! I used to have ghost from its very early Binary research days but honestly this version is poor.

Leaving my system in such a bad state is just unacceptable.

2

From the partinfo you sent, it appears at first glance that the only anomaly is that you have an EFI-enable system and a partition created with EFI. Officially, EFI is not going to be supported until the next version of Ghost. However, this should not have necessarily caused the error you got.

 

The GEAR issue was addressed in a newer version of an uninstall file. If you send me a message, I can send it to you. I'll post it here as soon as possible also.