Norton 14 task bar Icon says "At Risk" when it really isn't

I've been dealing with this since October.

For some reason when I would boot up the computer and Ghost loaded, the task bar Icon would show a red X and say "At Risk". If I try to open Ghost to see what the problem is, the red X would turn to a green check mark as the Ghost program opened??? The red X would also change to the green check mark when a scheduled backup started.

Now the strange part...I had been having problems with Windows Automatic Update Service hanging upon bootup, thus dramatically increasing the time it took for the computer to fully boot up. (6 minutes or more).

I went into Services and change the setting to Manual for Automatic Update and BIT and the computer would boot far quicker (2 to 3 min.), HOWEVER, when I made those changes, that is when Ghost would show the red X in the system tray, upon booting up the computer. If I put the settings of Automatic Update and BIT back to Automatic, then Ghost would show a green check mark, but then the computer took forever to boot up. It was as if Ghost like all that extra bootup time????

As an experiment, I loaded a program call "Start up Delayer" and set Ghost to a 15 second delay before loading once Windows started loading. Bingo! Ghost loaded with the green check mark!?!?!

So now, I have the Automatic Update and BIT set to manual and use Start up Delayer to delay the loading of Ghost and now Ghost is fine.

What the heck??? How does Windows Automatic Update service and BIT serivce have anything to do with Ghost??  Or is there something in how fast the computer boots up that confuses Ghost???

I run XP Pro SP3, Eset NOD32, Webroot Spysweeper, ZA Pro. and yes all patches are up todate.

I've been dealing with this since October.

For some reason when I would boot up the computer and Ghost loaded, the task bar Icon would show a red X and say "At Risk". If I try to open Ghost to see what the problem is, the red X would turn to a green check mark as the Ghost program opened??? The red X would also change to the green check mark when a scheduled backup started.

Now the strange part...I had been having problems with Windows Automatic Update Service hanging upon bootup, thus dramatically increasing the time it took for the computer to fully boot up. (6 minutes or more).

I went into Services and change the setting to Manual for Automatic Update and BIT and the computer would boot far quicker (2 to 3 min.), HOWEVER, when I made those changes, that is when Ghost would show the red X in the system tray, upon booting up the computer. If I put the settings of Automatic Update and BIT back to Automatic, then Ghost would show a green check mark, but then the computer took forever to boot up. It was as if Ghost like all that extra bootup time????

As an experiment, I loaded a program call "Start up Delayer" and set Ghost to a 15 second delay before loading once Windows started loading. Bingo! Ghost loaded with the green check mark!?!?!

So now, I have the Automatic Update and BIT set to manual and use Start up Delayer to delay the loading of Ghost and now Ghost is fine.

What the heck??? How does Windows Automatic Update service and BIT serivce have anything to do with Ghost??  Or is there something in how fast the computer boots up that confuses Ghost???

I run XP Pro SP3, Eset NOD32, Webroot Spysweeper, ZA Pro. and yes all patches are up todate.

AllenM:Thanks for the help.

According to Startup Delayer I have  12 programs including Ghost that are loaded at startup. Looking at Autoruns it shows 15 programs under the logon tab.

If I do as you suggest and make sure that "No Status Reporting is checked..." wouldn't that prevent Ghost from alerting me to any problems with my backup hard drives??

By the way, I have two backup hard drives...one is an internal IDE drive (F:\) and the other is an external SATA hard drive (G:\) that is actually connected to one of the SATA connection on the motherboard, so I guess it is, in a sense, really an internal drive that sits on top of my computer in an enclosure.  My C:\ drive is an internal SATA drive connected to the other motherboard SATA connector.

HI Sagdawg,

 

Thanks for the update. Regarding no status reporting on your backup drive. The whole purpose of the status reporting is to alert you to when your backups are out of date or the last one did not complete for whatever reason. Since you do not do backups of your backup drive, you want no status reporting selected. It is your backup drive, therefore it never gets backed up which is normal and desired. Same with file and folder backups; if you do not do this type of backup then you don't want Ghost alerting you to the fact that the file and folder backup is out of date.

 

You mentioned having two backup drives. Ghost will only let you configure one backup drive. The other drive can be used but would only be able to have independant backups saved and would not be part of the regular recovery point chain.That is unless you have this second drive configured as off site storage?

 

How do you have status reporting currently configured?

 

Thanks

Allen

Message Edited by AllenM on 12-20-2009 12:46 PM
Message Edited by AllenM on 12-20-2009 01:26 PM

AllenM:

If I understand your post...I do not need any status reporting of my backup drives. I currently have full reporting status of both backup drives and Main drive. I thought that including full reporting of the backup drives would alert me to problems with those backup drives. I was concerned that setting the backup drives to no reporting would not alert me to a backup failure or problem. How would I know if that happened? Would Ghost alert me anyway that the backup didn't go through or there is a problem with one of the backup destination drives because I have the main drive set to full reporting status?

 

Let me explain my setup:

Backup drive G:\ is scheduled each weekday at 12:00 noon to do a full backup. Its full backup image files (2 weeks worth) are saved on Drive G:\ in a separate backup folder.

Backup drive F:\ is scheduled each weekday at 7:00 pm to also do a full backup. Its full backup image files (1 weeks worth) is save on Drive F:\ in a separate folder.

In otherwords I do two full images per day on different hard drives. I use this computer in my business and critical information is added or changed often. I've always had all drives set on full reporting status without any problems in the past...

I do not do any file backups and have turned off status reporting and I don't believe I have either backup drive set to offsight backups.

During this period of trying to figure out why I was suddenly getting the red X, I right clicked on the Ghost task bar icon and opened Options. There I noticed that it had a place for "Default Backup Location" and was set to Drive G:\'s backup folder. I tried changing it to Drive F:\ and then leaving it totally blank (where it is now) but it didn't change the red X problem upon boot up.

This is what has eventually (after 2 months of experimenting) led me to the  Startup Delayer program which has worked.

Since my computer information is critical, if you are sure that I am safe in removing any status reporting of the backup drives then I will do that to see if the red X At Risk goes away. (I'll also deactivate the Startup Delayer program at the same time). What should I change the Default Backup Location field to in Options?

 

Hi Sagdawg,

 

Thanks for the update. First on the status reporting. If there were problems with the backup drive this would be detected because it would cause the backup itself to fail which should show an X because of the failed backup, thereby alerting you to the problem. The other important thing is to ensure that your backup job itself is set to do automatic verify. With the automatic verify, if there were any problem with the backup drive it will cause a failure of the backup itself which you will be alerted to. The automatic verify reads the entire image back from the backup drive and calculates a CRC checksum to compare with the one calculated during the backup itself. The CRC checksum is stored in the backup image for comparison during verify. It is about as fool-proof as you can get.

 

Added edit: I might add that I don't know the status reporting is what is causing the red X in your case but it can cause Ghost to report this as a problem so it is always best to set to no status reporting for your backup drive.

 

About the backup drive location. Are you then doing independant recovery point backups with Ghost? Ghost only allows one backup destination and you can set this to whichever backup drive you prefer. Independant recovery points (backups) can be saved to whatever drive you choose and does not have to be the designated backup drive.

 

I understand what you want to accomplish and I don't blame you one bit. There are a few options for this:

 

1) Have a RAID array. I use an internal SATA RAID 1 array.

2) Have a desginated backup drive and do independant recovery points to the second drive. I believe this is what you are probably doing. Please confirm.

3) Designate your second drive as an off-site drive. Ghost will then mirror all backups to that second drive, giving you fail-safe redundancy. NOTE: If you do this, ensure that your second drive as the same size or larger than your primary backup drive.

4) Less desirable - occasionally copy recovery points to the second drive manually.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Allen

Message Edited by AllenM on 12-20-2009 06:26 PM
Message Edited by AllenM on 12-20-2009 06:29 PM

Hi Sagdawg,

 

Sorry, one more thing to add. For you, since you have essentially two drives you use exclusively for backups you should set both to no status reporting.

 

Allen

Thanks for all the help.

Below is answers to your questions.

 

"The other important thing is to ensure that your backup job itself is set to do automatic verify."

 

I always have the backups set to auto verify.

 

 

"About the backup drive location. Are you then doing independent recovery point backups with Ghost?"

Yes each daily backup of is set as an independent recovery point. (one each for each hdrive, each day)

 

"Ghost only allows one backup destination and you can set this to whichever backup drive you prefer."

 

Well I guess since I only do one backup image to each of the backup drives each day, Ghost most be OK with that. Looking at Drive G:\ there are 14 recovery point (images) saved on a rolling basis. Drive F:\ has 7 recovery point (images) saved on a rolling basis.

I have had to use them on occasions to restore my system when a new install went bad or corruption occurred.

 

By the way, I set the two backup drives to error reporting only (as a test) and de activated Startup Delayer and then rebooted. Ghost loaded with the green check mark...so maybe that was all I needed to do. Will keep watching this over the next few days to see how Ghost does. I guess the only unanswered question here is why did this issue just start after all this time with the two backup drives set with full reporting???  And then why did it go away when I use the Startup Delayer to delay when Ghost loaded???

Strange.

Thanks again for all your help.

Hi Sagdawg,

 

As for backup destination, the independant recovery points are the key. This allows you to specify any destination drive of your choosing. The most usual way is that Ghost is configured to do backups on a schedule with a base + incremental backups performed on a regular basis. When used in this conventional way, all backups are stored to a single destination drive.

 

Error status reporting for the backup drives is better than full status reporting. This should also prevent Ghost from flagging the drive as "at risk" for the sole reason that no backups have been performed.

 

Not sure why this problem would have just started recently but I think there is a balancing act which takes place too. When I first started using Ghost many years ago I neglected to set no status reporting for file and folder backups, but I also did not have a scheduled backup for files and folders. Sometimes Ghost would report status at risk and other times it would not, possibly because it realized at some level that since I had no file and folder backups configured it was intentional and therefore did not report it.

 

I recall that it was pretty intermittent as to whether Ghost reported at risk or not. Once I set the file and folder backup to no status reporting, never had another false status reported since, and this is going through several versions of Ghost.

 

Please check back later and let me know how it goes over the next few days.

 

Thanks

Allen

AllenM:

Yea, I use to do a full and incremental backup to a single backup drive, but decided that I had better switch to two independent backup drives, just in case one of them went bad. Sort of the "don't place all your eggs in one basket" syndrome. Once I did that, I then changed to simply doing independent full image backups to each drive, each day.

 

And yes, I too was seeing that sometimes Ghost would load with the green check mark (about 10% of the time) and the red X (about 90% of the time). Flakey! Thus my quest to figure out what the heck was causing that...and more importantly, was there a backup integrity problem.

 

Started up the computer this morning and so far all is well.

 

By the way, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but are you a tech support person who works for Ghost (Symantec) or just an individual who knows a lot about this program and is trying to help others.

 

Hi Sagdawg,

 

I don't work for Symantec, just a software engineer who has been using Ghost + other Symantec products for many years. I guess you could say I am somewhat of a computer geek as well. :smileywink:

 

If your backup images verify successfully I wouldn't worry about the integrity of your backups. I've done a good 8-10 system restorals with various versions of Ghost.

 

Allen

Well then, thanks for helping poor souls like me.

Happy Holidays.

SAG

Hi Sag,

 

Happy holidays to you as well.

 

Allen