Success at last, almost! I used the removal tool, then reinstalled Ghost, did live update successfully on it and then reinstalled the Comcast Norton Security Suite (getting a newer version than on my other computers and I wonder about that but that’s a question for the Comcast folks) The only problem is that Ghost does not recognize the backups created by previous installations. The older files can be seen in Recovery Point Browser but the space occupied by the older backups appears as “other unused space” in the Backup Destination portion of Home and if I click on “Run or Manage Backups” only the backups created since the last install appear. Is there a way to get the current installation of Ghost to recognize the full set of backups or should I just delete the old files? Thanks Jim
HI Jim,
Thanks for the update and apologies for taking so long to get back to you. I was out of town all day.
I believe you are referring to image backups (Backup my Computer), correct? There is no way to have Ghost reimport the backups you previously done to get them into the history.
However the good news is your image backups are fully usable even though they do not appear in the history. You can still restore files from these image backups or indeed restore the entire partition if you wanted to.
You can load them up in the Recovery Point Browser. Once loaded click on the top entry on the left hand side of the window and click Verify to assure yourself that the images are intact. You can also restore files, etc from here. Alternatively you can go to Windows Explorer and right click the recovery point file and select Mount where you can then access it via Windows Explorer.
Please let me know how it goes.
Allen
No need to appologize. Actually, I notice that people have kudos and the help you've provided certainly deserves some. I just read how to do that. So I'm the one behind. But I have to go out myself soon, so I'll have to come back later to do that.
Concerning the backups, what I was concerned about was managing the backups rather than whether I could use them. I assummed since they were visible in Recovery Point Browser that they'd be OK. But, Ghost will alert me when the backup drive fills up and suggest what to delete. Since these old backups aren't known to the current installation, it will never suggest deleting them but rather it will suggest deleting backups that are more recent.
Since Ghost can remember old backups from one installation to another if you select the correct option on uninstall, it would not be an impossible enhancement to add to Ghost.
But you can't do it with Norton Removal Tool. Even if you do uninstall Ghost, telling it to remember user options, and then use Norton Removal Tool to remove the remaining Norton products, Ghost will lose that memory. Unless, I suppose, you knew exactly what files you had to squirrel away before using Norton Removal Tool and then how to restore them afterwards. Since you may have to use Norton Removal Tool, there really ought to be away to import the old backups.
Thanks
Jim
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the update. Yes I do see your point from a Ghost backup drive management perspective. I do agree it would be good if Ghost offered this capability. It does offer this for file and folder backups but never has for image backups and I'm sure it was ommitted because the images are still usable. I will make this suggestion to Symantec but of course I can't promise it will make it into a future version of Ghost.
I will however look into how to work around this. I am pretty familiar with all the files used by Ghost and their purpose so it might be possible to manually restore files to the appropriate location so that Ghost can pick up the history again. What I'm not sure without further testing is whether this history relies on any sort of registry key which would make it more tricky to work around it.
I'll try to do that sometime in the next week or so and let you know. If it can be done I will also start including that when working with other users going forward.
Edit: I don't think this is going to help you for this time though because once you have done even a single backup with your new installation you would not want to replace these files or you would lose the history of the new backups. But it might help you in the future if you have any similar issue, hopefully you won't have problems in the future though. Merging of two files containing different backup history definitely would not be possible without built-in support from the Ghost software
Thanks
Allen
Hi Jim,
As promised I have done some testing on being able to restore the files associated with the history of Ghost image backups. This test was successful! 
The files in:
C:\ProgramData\Symantec\Norton Ghost\History (Vista/Windows 7) or
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\FileBackup (Windows XP)
have to be backed up first. Once Ghost is completely removed these files can be restored and Ghost will once again have the history of image backups it had before being removed.
So if one has to completely remove Ghost, these files can be restored to get the image backup history back into the Ghost program.
I have made note of this for other users in the future if faced with a similar situation where Ghost has to be completely removed.
If you consider your problem solved please mark this thread by clicking the Accept as solution button on the post which you believe contained the solution. This will allow others to know the problem is solved and quickly get to the solution when they search the forums.
Best wishes.
Allen
OK, I gave out a kudo and accepted the solution but...
The kudo and the solution isn't really tied to any one post but rather to the sequence.
The real kudo goes to AllenM's sticking with me through the whole thing untill solved and then going the extra step to solve how to save/restore backup status across a Norton Removal Tool removal (or any other "complete" removal) of Ghost. Thank you very much AllenM.
The accepted solution may now be tied to the post about saving/restoring backup status which really isn't the problem that started this thread. To summarize what I think the complete solution was:
1) Verify that McAfee was removed (not in add/remove programs).
2) Download and run Malware Bytes and run Norton scan to ensure there is no infection.
3) Save the files suggested by AllenW to capture backup status
4) Run NRT
5) Restore saved files.
6) Reinstall Ghost
7) Do live update on Ghost
8) Reinstall Comcast's Norton Security Suit
Jim
One more thing...
Although everything is now cleared up, there appears to me to still be a couple of problems that Norton needs to address:
1. Live Update should be a transaction that passes the ACID test. ACID stands for Atomic, Consistent, Isolated and Durable. The "Atomic" part means that a transaction either succeeds or nothing happens. In this case the transaction failed (as indicated by error messages and error logs) but something did happen: Ghost was gone.
2. After the restart following Live Update, the installer ran silently in the background for about two hours repeatedly encountering the same problem, which was not going to magically go away upon retry, and without telling the user that anything was wrong except by putting lots of logs in C:\Windows\temp. There was no way to stop it until it finally (and mercifully) quit on its own. Killing the process (either one - there were normally two) in Task Manager simply resulted in it starting again.
Jim