I'm running Norton Ghost 14 under Vista SP1 on my laptop. Recently I became aware that something had been silently corrupting more and more of the data on that machine's hard drive for some time -- long enough that restoring any of my NG recovery points just puts me to an earlier corrupted state.
So I want to blow away the OS on this box and reload it from the disks and updates, then reload Ghost, then restore the latest "File and Folders" from its backup repository (on an external USB disk drive). But if I do that, of course, I'll have blown away the file:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\FileBackup\Catalog.dat
And I don't believe Ghost will be able to see the F&F backup on the external drive.
Question: If I copy the Catalog.dat file to the external disk, then copy it back after I re-install Ghost, will the newly re-installed Ghost be able to restore the "Files and Folders" backup from the external disk back onto the laptop hard drive?
If not, is there any other way to preserve NG's "view" of the F&F backups on the external disk across the OS re-install?
NOTE: I already tried to load the F&F backups from within the Recovery Disk environment: I booted up the Recovery Disk, selected "Recover My Files," navigated over to where the F&F backups are stored, and tried to open one. It didn't work. I could navigate to the F&F backup folders from just fine, but all the files in there are of type *.fbf, and Ghost seems to want to open files of types *.v2i, *.iv2i, or *.pqi -- recovery points, in other words.
For completeness's sake, here are the settings for my File and Folders backup:
Options:
Backup name: Personal Files Backup
Backup destination: [Backups]\Backups\FilesAndFolders\
[ ] Save backup files to a unique subfolderDescription: Personal Files and Folders Backup
I need to go ahead and get this done -- the laptop is basically a space-heater until I reload it -- so I welcome any and all suggestions.
Thanks!
-- Ed