I have two HP-NX9600 laptops running windowsXP and I make regualr backups with Norton Ghost 15 and have restored several times in the past from an external USB drive. I restored one laptop recently and had something strange happen. The restore of the C: drive (100Gb) created a C: drive of 93Gb and a D: drive of the same capacity but the D: drive holds appx 2.5Gb of user account data. In addition, the new image sees the backup it was restored from as being a year old but looking at the image on the drive shows the correct backup date. When the restore was originally run it showed the correct backup date.
I've tried recovering a number of times. This last time I see the 3 disks separately (+ system reserved) in Disk Management. In my pervious attempts you could see 1 596gb partition and 1 other primary parition of 297gb (+ system reserved). But not one full partition.
I switched from a 2 disk raid 1 array to a 3 disk raid 0 array. Before I did this I made a full backup to a USB drive and created a custom SRD disk with the Intel Storage Array 32bit drivers. Once the 3 disk raid 0 array was created I booted with the customer SRD and start a restore - it appeared to work.
Once I rebooted I got a 0xc0000225 boot error. Using the win7 disk to repair worked to where I can boot up and use the system BUT I can only see about 1/3 of the actual disk space in my array. From what I can tell the win 7 repair modified the boot record by adding some entries and setting the partition label and size which was BLANK!
Does anybody know how I can fix this and get the restore to work properly.
What size are these hard drives, 300GB or 1TB each?
In your screen shot I'm confused if Disk 0 is just showing one drive, or if it's showing the whole array because of the 3 partitions being approx the same size.
I think they must have been 300GB drives because of the size of the image, and the same 2 drives are being used with one new drive added.
That explains why 2 partitions are the same size and the third is slightly diferent, it's the new drive.
If thats the case then the array is not correct, it looks like it was put together as a JBOD instead of RAID 0 and we are seeing the empty partitions (drives actually) because the restored partition was not expanded.
Yes, of course. I'm being lazy and can't think in binary at the moment. :)
I don't know much at all about RAID. However I do know that it's the RAID controller responsible to all the disk translations and eveything else should be seamless from the standpoint of Windows or Ghost.
In a restore Ghost would just pass all the data to the RAID controller and the controller would be in charge of taking all that data and correctly writing it to the drives in whatever configuration it should be.
So for that reason I would suspect the RAID array is not setup correctly. The location of the restored partitions kind of point to that as well.
After a lot of trial and error I was able to fix the problem with the restore.
First: The raid array wasn't the problem. I was able to confirm this by extending the C: primary partition (298g) with an unalocated partition (298g - on the right in screenshot). Additionally, I got a 200mbs transfer rate with HD Tune. The drives individually get (80mbs). Note: I had pre-loaded the raid drivers when I created the custom recovery disk.
Solution:
It was becoming clear the partitions were the problem.
I went into repair mode with the win7 disk and used diskpart in command line mode to delete all partitions and create two new ones:
1) Primary partition - 100mb
2) Primary partition - rest of unallocated space
Then I loaded the custom recovery disk back up and selected:
1) Recover my computer
2) Selected the recovery point I wanted from my USB drive.
3) Individually selected the "system reserved" recovery point and *IMPORTANT* clicked on EDIT which then lets you select which partition you want that recovery point to be restored to. I selected the 100mb partition. Note: the restore MBR checkbox was not selected.
4) I then did the same with C Drive recovery point except this time selected the second larger partition I had created.
5) Ran the restore
That's it! Worked perfectly with no errors on startup. See screen shot:
So did the Ghost 15 SRD reverse the partition order during recovery? That is a known bug and I wish they would release a new SRD to fix this bug. Apparently Ghost's enterprise cousin, Symantec System Recovery, has been updated already to fix this bug. I guess Symantec has no love for Norton Ghost users anymore.
NG appeared to have switched the placement of the partitions on the disk. Creating the system reserved 100M partition in the middle of the other partitions prevented me from extending/combining the non system reserved partitions together. I had to make my own partition placement and size and have NG use them instead.
Well, I am confused. Your latest screenshot shows a 894 GiB drive. But I'd expect it to show 298 GiB in RAID 0. What do you guys think? Or is my thinking incorrect?
The SRP and everything remain the same size but all the data is "striped" (equally split) between the 3 drives. It's still 100MB but split between the drives.
In a RAID 0, the size of the drives are combined so they appear as one big drive. When data is written to the array it is equally spit between the 3 drives. That increases performance because all 3 drives can be reading or writing different blocks of data at the same time. Theoretically (but not actually) tripling the performance of the read and writes and reducing the seek time because instead of one block of data per seek time, you get 3 blocks of data because you have 3 drives working in parallel.
In actual practice, you don't get 3 times the performance because there is a lot of overhead involved with the RAID controller striping and unstriping the data but you definatly get the performance increase in the seek time for the data.
Of course the downside is that if one drive fails you loose 1/3 of everything and whats left may not even be complete files.
I have two HP-NX9600 laptops running windowsXP and I make regualr backups with Norton Ghost 15 and have restored several times in the past from an external USB drive. I restored one laptop recently and had something strange happen. The restore of the C: drive (100Gb) created a C: drive of 93Gb and a D: drive of the same capacity but the D: drive holds appx 2.5Gb of user account data. In addition, the new image sees the backup it was restored from as being a year old but looking at the image on the drive shows the correct backup date. When the restore was originally run it showed the correct backup date.
Anyone have an idea what is wrong??
Thanks,
PaulN
Welcome PaulN,
Any chance the time/date on the laptop was incorrect?
That's interresting. I can't recall if I checked current time on the laptop when the restore was made but I'm sure it's ok now. What's odd is I ran the restore from the application (rather than from the boot disk) and it correctly identified the backup as being one week old. After the restore, the newly restored image OS now sees the same backup as being a year old plus the creation of a new D: drive! Ghost is now telling me I need to backup both .. the D: drive having never been backed up and the C: drive being out of date. I have a spare drive that I might install and try the restore again. I don't really want to do a backup of the hard drive as it is now .. I'm just hoping the backup on the external drive is good!
That's interresting. I can't recall if I checked current time on the laptop when the restore was made but I'm sure it's ok now. What's odd is I ran the restore from the application (rather than from the boot disk) and it correctly identified the backup as being one week old. After the restore, the newly restored image OS now sees the same backup as being a year old plus the creation of a new D: drive! Ghost is now telling me I need to backup both .. the D: drive having never been backed up and the C: drive being out of date. I have a spare drive that I might install and try the restore again. I don't really want to do a backup of the hard drive as it is now .. I'm just hoping the backup on the external drive is good!
Thanks,
PaulN
Paul,
Have you discovered an undocumented feature of your computer of your software?
The difference between 2 and 3 is only one bit in the least significant position so there's another possibility.
