Norton ghost 14 - "copy my hard drive"

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Unfortunately, when bad sectors are involved, there is no 100% solution.  Nevertheless, let me see if I can help.  But, please realize the order of my answers will not match the order of the questions.

 

1) If there are bad sectors on a drive, it is almost certain you will need to use the 'Ignore Bad Sectors' option. 

2) In this situation, if the copy will work with SmartSector Copying turned on, I would certainly have it on.  Smart Sector Copy copies only the sectors that have data in use as recognized in use by the file system.  Turning this off forces Ghost to try to copy everything.

3) Resizing the drive does as you suspect and resizes the partition to use all unallocated space on the destination drive or partition.  The wording was chosen by our UI designers to hopefully help those that know less than you do about computers.  But while we are on the topic of resizing, enabling/ disabling this feature can some times help in getting a drive with bad sectors copied.

4) Set Active marks the resulting partition on the destination as the active one in the partition table.  This can only be done on a primary partition.

5) As to the drive letter, don't worry about it.  When you remove the old drive and boot from the new one, Windows should make it your drive C:.

 

Dear Johan

 

Thank you for your response. Allow me to comment and in the same order as the matters you raise.

 

1. Ignore Bad Sectors. You may have read or may care to read my advisory on this whole procedures (link is here).

    What I think Symantec needs to consider is the difference between "marked bad sectors" and newly discovered sectors. It

    remains unclear whether this option is in respect of the former or the latter or both.

 

2. I agree Smartsector copying should be disabled.

 

3. Not sure about "enabling/disbaling this feature can some time help in getting a drive with bad sectors copied", for two reasons. First it is unclear whether you are suggesting either enabling or disabling, and secondly I did not want to copy "marked bad sectors".

 

4. Agreed

 

5. Disagree. Both Symantec and Western Digital say that a Ghost operation will require the drive to be initially marked as D before removing and rebooting.

 

What I have to say is this. I questioned these options when I had the trial version and before buying Ghost and using it. I was assured that it was possible to copy the damaged drive and for the existing bad sectors to be excluded from the new Drive. Having then purchased the full product, and just prior to affecting the Ghost operation I called Chat support again. I not only receive contradictory advice, but when I was transferred to Mohammad as the supervisor responsible for Ghost support, he in turn completely contradicted his advisors and he affected the copy operation. What I ended up with was a clone drive. That is, my brand new perfect drive now had marked bad sectors. Now, I do not know if you or Symantec realise but an NTFS drive with bad marked sectors cannot under Windows be corrected whatsoever. There are procedures under Unix/Linux but I am not prepared to experiment.

 

Suffice then to say that I relied upon Norton, they affected the copy operation using remote control and they made a brand new drive report "bad sectors". Which of the options selected by Norton actually is responsible for the "clone" (which is exactly what I did not want) I still am unsure. Indeed if you look widely on the net, you will see that this is a common complaint by users, including Western Digital, of Ghost. There are only so many permutations of these options, and really Norton ought to test all permutations to know how they work in conjunction with eachother. It is not rocket science - as they say. Being so disappointed by support, having wasted my money on product and time, and having ended up with what I did not want, and having failed singularly, even as a Guru, to escalate my concerns and seek support, I have in direct consequence, resigned as a Guru to this forum.

I read your advisory.  It is interesting, but I need to go over it in greater detail before I respond to it.

 

I will admit that our handling of bad sectors is not always what you would consider the best or optimal.  It is certainly something that we can improve upon.   And I'm hoping in the future we will be able to address it.  But let me respond to your comments.

 

1) This option is effective only on the backup.  Being a sector based backup product, that wants to capture everything correctly, this option allows us to get a backup in the presence of bad sectors.  Without it, we would try to get information from the bad sector and fatally stop if we could not get it.  Ignore Bad Sectors is not a cure or mechanism to repair bad sectors.  We do not have the ability to verify bad sectors and put them back in operation.  That is a role and responsibility of the OS.

 

Part of the problem that you are running into is the Bad Sector Table.  Our task is to restore a drive to its EXACT state at the time of backup.  The Bad Sector Table is also restored since it is part of the file system.  And it should be since if you were restoring an image back to a drive and it has bad sectors, we can't just zap the table in the process of the restore or the user at some point will put a file over the bad sector and get some file corruption.  But this does create a problem for those that are restoring onto a new drive since the bad sector table is restored -- they will have sectors marked bad that are not.  It was decided that this was the lesser of two evils.

 

2) No, the preferred method is to have Smart Sector Copy turned on.  When it is on less data is copied.  In most cases you don't need to have all the blank or unused sectors copied.  So, with Smart Sector Copy turned on, blank or unused sectors do not get copied.

 

3) This was only suggested as a possible workaround when trying to get data off a bad drive as copying data in this case is not a guaranteed thing.  It is something we try to make our best efforts at.

 

4)  --

 

5) I can only speak from experience.  And if others disagree on this that is fine.

 

6) Someone was certainly not informed when they told you or gave you the impression that Ghost would solve your bad sector problems.  I'm sorry if a Symantec employee gave that to you.  As I said before unfortunately, when bad sectors are involved, there is no 100% solution.  We will certainly will try our best.  But I hope that you realize that our goal is solely to try to help people preserve their data.

 

7) Now, if a clone is not what you want, might I suggest an alternative way of getting a drive copied.  This alternative way is not generally mentioned since it requires the user to be knowledgeable enough and capable of doing the needed steps and handling any issues that may arise.  This alternative method involves the following.

      1) Create an image of the bad drive.

      2) Put the new drive in and boot to the SRD.

      3) Create a partition on the new drive and set it active.

      4) Create an MBR.  The RestoreMBR utility on the SRD in X:\Windows\Shell\Utilities

      4) Bring up the Recovery Point Browser and open up the image

      5) Have the browser copy or restore all the files from the image into the partition you have created

      6) Reboot and make sure things worked.

 

 

 

Hi

Using the same references.

 

1. Am I understanding you correctly please? Are you saying that in fact Ghost is only capable of cloning a drive and cannot therefore ignore previously marked "bad blocks"? To avoid any confusion, are you saying that the "copy a drive" routine will always copy previously "marked bad blocks"?

 

If so, then you may be amused by this snippet from one of my chat sessions:-

 

 

S: Please do not check the option disable smart sector copying, it will copy the sector by sector and clusters by cluster, it will copy the exact drive to another drive,

S: We suggest uncheck the option disable smart sector copying.

S: Yes, you can check the option Ignore Bad sectors during copy.

S: It will ignore the bad sectors of your source hard drive. and you will get a good drive after copy drive operation.

Mr.: Not quite clear. If I enable Smartsector copying, you are saying that the existing "marked" bad blocks WOULD be recreated on the replacement drive. Is that correct?

S: Yes

Mr.: Good.

Mr.: But then I am unclear about "ignore bad sectors". Lets assume I have disabled smartsector copying. Then again if I did NOT "ignore bad sectors during copying" surely this would not copy existing "marked" bad blocks but refers to any new bad sectors that are found when it tries to copy data. Sorry, we are doing well but I just need to be 100% on this. I have GHost 14 purchased just for this one off exercise.

S: Ignore bad sector will not copy the bad sectors of source drive to destination drive if you check that option.

 

I have other chat sessions and then of course there is that conversation and remote control by the supervisor who insisted that it was possible to use Ghost to copy a drive without copying over existing marked bad blocks!.

 

I have to say that I am still unclear on this option. Are you in fact saying that "ignore bad sectors" is in reference to newly detected bad sectors during the copy and has nothing to do with pre-existing marked bad sectors (i.e. sectors reported as bad in a chkdsk for example)?

 

2. Sorry that was a typo on my behalf.

 

3.,4, 5

 

6. Well actually three employees on the chat session, and then of course there is my posting in the forum (we cannot mention), the code word is Roswell. I think my intention was clear and certainly my reading of the responses was that Ghost would do the job and could ignore existing bad blocks. Preserving bad blocks does not in my view preserve data; at any rate not live data.

 

7. I do not profess to understand all those instructions, but I get the point. Dont use Ghost!.Yet, you say make an image and I have no idea what software you had in mind. Never mind.

 

What I can say here is that it took 2 hours to get Symantec chat to understand that their instructions to copy drive do NOT include initialisation of the drive. Symantec told me to simply connect the drive physically in the machine, turn on and Ghost will work. It wont. The drive has to be initialised. Western Digital knew this and gave me the answer in less than 30 seconds, without which the chat to resolve that aspect alone would have gone way beyond 2 hours.

 

Lastly what I wanted to do was always made clear, initially and to the supervisor. For example:

 

Mr.: No sure. I want to copy everything off existing drive to replacement drive, but do not want the exististing "marked" bad blocks copies. I do want to know if during the copying exercise any other bad blocks are detected and which files are thus corrupted. Then when completed I can concentrate on attending to the files that were corrupted.

 

I'm sure you will agree the above is clear enough. At no time did anyone say that this was not possible. Had they done so, I would have turned elsewhere for another solution. Probably Acronis. It is not the waste of time that I so object to, its the fact that the new disk is now marked bad in direct consequence of Symantec's operation of my computer under remote control. I have had no apology from the supervisor, no return of call, no compensation, and no-one offering to resolve their mistake.

I appreciate your responses and perhaps if technical support were better trained or had links to yourself, this problem may not have arisen. Taking remote control over someone's PC and then being incompetent in their actions, is in my view gross negligence. Symantec ought to have insurance to cover the negligent actions of its employees. The cost of me now replacing the hard drive again is £53.79. Shouldn't be a big deal for Symantec when its selling its software for around £40 a throw.

Message Edited by cgoldman on 09-12-2008 11:21 PM
[edit: removed personal information per the Participation Guidelines and Terms of Service. Note we still have the identity from the chat log on file.]
Message Edited by Allen_K on 09-13-2008 12:39 AM