PaulN,
Can you post a screenshot of Disk Management? We need to see the layout of C: and D:
Yes, I'll try to get that this afternoon.
Yesterday I installed a spare hard drive and restored it from the boot CD. It restored correctly, that is just a C: drive appears. (It's actually a 250G drive but restored as the original 100Gsize). The restore rescue program found the backup correctly and said it was from 15 days ago which is correct. I had it verify the backup before the restore and check for file errors after restoring. Everything appears ok except for Norton AV. It posted an error and Norton Autofix ran and requested restarting the computer. It was unable to fix the problem and connected me to Open Suport which wants me to completely uninstall-reinstall Norton AV and any other Norton products from original install disks (Norton Ghost 15!). So I removed that disk and put the first restored disk back in that is functioning ok, but has an errant "D:" drive.
I'll get the snap of Disk Management and also get the error message that came from yesterday's restore.
Is it possible this error is related to too many installations of Norton AV?? I don't know how Norton monitors this but I just happened to think that with yesterdays installation it is now on a 4th disk although the last two should be clones. Anyway, my goal is to get this laptop functioning correctly and run a good backup!!
Thanks for all your help!!
PaulN
pauln,
Just for information; any time you do a restore and mess with the timestamps on the Norton av products they will require an uninstall and reinstall to correct that. Using the Norton tool will also take out all other Norton products so you have the same situation with them - they need to be reinstalled.
There are online copies of those programs that you can download and reduce the updating time after they are installed
I'll have to find the Ghost link 
Dick,
I'm not sure what messing with the time stamps is. After the restore on a 2nd disk the Norton Autofix just came up on it's own. I hadn't looked at anything on NIS, in fact it hadn't come up yet. I did notice on both restored disks the Norton Ghost application is not seeing the backup image date (it was restored from) correctly but the rescue CD does. (??).
I have the original Ghost 15 install CD and serial but a download link of Ghost would be helpful. I have had no previous issues with ghost and have used several versions over the last 8 years. I've used NIS for about 3 years and maintained 3 compters under the same purchase. So you don't believe the 4th installed on the spare disk was part of the issue?
Again .. thanks for all the help.
PaulN
paul,
If your subscription is for three computers and you have it installed and running on four there is a real problem. The Norton server will not cooperate which means that nothing on what it considers the fourth installation will work as expected
I'll see what I can find on the Ghost link
edit: try - www.norton.com/ng15
I tried it and it didn't work so no promises
This link works;
Dicks link looks OK but takes you to gh15 instead of ng15.
DaveH wrote:This link works;
Dicks link looks OK but takes you to gh15 instead of ng15.
My bad
Sorry
Dick,
Sorry I have not explained this well.
I have one legit license for Ghost on the Laptop I am having issues with.
I have NIS that is installed on 3 computers which is legit.
The hard drive on this laptop failed and I have two spare drives. When the first drive was installed and restored it came up with a C: and D: drives (although seems to be working ok) so I tried the 2nd drive and it restored correctly with one C: but NIS is coming up with error 8506, 422. ...so my though was .. not knowing how Norton verifies it's product usage .. could it be that it sees the 2nd disk (when it is installed) as one too many?? Tecnically NIS isn't running on four computers but is installed on two drives that are being tested alternately in one laptop. I searched on this error and got back tons of issues that I'll look into.
To update you on the drive issue, following your advice I made snaps of Disk Management under both drives and I see that part of this issue has to do with the larger disks I am testing. The original that died was a 100Gb (93Gb) and the two spares are 250Gb. Even the 2nd restore that correctly shows one drive (C:) has an unknown partition and unallocated space the original disk did not have. I am currently using Drive-1 that has C&D partitions and it seems to be working ok. I am somewhat uneasy about this wondering what else it did besides pushing up the drive letters. I would pursue getting rid of the NIS error on Drive-2 if I knew the problem was not related to "too many instances". I don't know how to work around that. I will try investigating a resolution to that this morning.
Again, my goal here is to get ONE DISK running good ... make a good backup and continue life. I'm not sure which of these disks I should pursue. ..again .. thanks for all your help on this!!
PaulN
pauln,
I understand your original computer had a 100 GB HD with a single 93 GB partition.
In Drive 1, what is in the D: drive? Files and Folders. A screenshot would be nice.
In Drive 2, from Disk Management can you assign a drive letter to the Unknown partition. If you can, what does it contain?
but the D: drive holds appx 2.5Gb of user account data.
Not really. It holds 90.7 GB of data.
The letters are changed in the 2 screenshots because the user is booted into the different partitions for each screenshot.
You can also see the designation for "system" changes as well.
In the first screen shot the system is booted into the second partition. That one holds less data than the original first partition.
I would say it's an incomplete restore running as a hybred.
In the second screenshot the system is booted to the first partition and the second partition shows "Unknown" either because it has no drive letter assigned or the partition is offline because of a disk signature conflict.
The moral of the story is you can't restore the operating system partition from within windows.
Dave
Dave,
Thanks for your response.
The two screen shots are two different disks restored from the same backup image grabbed while each was installed. They were not installed at the same time. The backup was run from the NG restore CD. The original disk that failed was a 100Gb and the backup image was restored to two different 250Gb disks.
I have run several restores on the original disk but this is the first restore I've done to a larger disk and I'm really puzzled by these additional partitions. The previous restores to the original disk didn't look anything like this.
Thanks,
PaulN
Brian,
I'll investigate that and post it. I made a cursory browse of D: and it appeared to have a user account folder and some other data. I'll also try to assign the unknown partition.
Thanks for your help,
PaulN
Dave,
I need to correct something.
I should have said the RESTORE process was run from the NG restore CD.
(sorry)
PaulN
In both hard drives you can see that the restore did not go into the windows partition but it added a second partition.
In your original setup the windows partition was the first partition of the hard drive. With a bigger drive the rest of it was unallocated space and for some reason or another the restore went into that free space and created another partition instead of restoring the existing windows partition.
What concerns me is that the restore does not seem like it is complete.
In the first screenshot your original windows partition has about 90.74GB of data on it while the second partition (the restored one) has only 60.36GB.
Regardless, I assume you didn't want to end up with 2 windows partitions like that.
If you want to fix one of the drives, ths is what you want to do.
Boot to the recovery disk and select "recover my computer", then browse to and select the image to restore, just like you did before. On the next screen click the "edit" button.
Now you should see 2 or 3 hard drives and all the partitions on the hard drives.
Your windows drive will show 3 listings, each having the same drive number:
DWPLAP1
DWPLAP1
Unallocated Space
Click one time on the each listing of "DWPLAP1" to highlight it and then click the button to delete the partition.
When you are done you should see the entire drive now shows as "unallocated".
(just be careful that you have noted that drive number and your not deleting any partitions that are on other drives, you only want to delete the 2 that are labeled DWPLAP1)
With the "unallocated space" selected as the destination for the restore, use these settings from Brian:
Verify recovery point before restore
Resize drive after recover (unallocated space only) (ONLY if you want to)
Partition type : Primary
Check for file system errors after recovery
Set drive active (for booting OS)
Restore original disk signature
Restore master boot record
Your windows partition is running out of room so I suggest you resize it at least 30GB (30720MB).
Dave
Thanks to everyone who helped on this resolution. The instructions from DaveH fixed the issues. I had never used the "Edit" area of the restore process previously ... guess I never had to. The disk is now a 233Gb drive and looks good.
I have two issues remaining. For some reason there is a Symantec generic mount device that is not recognized (yellow question mark). I don't know if it is related to Ghost or NIS. The other is the dreaded NIS Error 8506 422 that I see in the NIS forum. It's interesting that this is a backup of a good running system with healthy NIS and the original is not online but Norton seems to think this doesn't look right. If you know how to get things realigned without uninstalling EVERYTHING (like it is asking) please respond. I'll continue watching here and post the NIS issue in that forum also.
Thanks to DaveH and everyone else .. the restore issue is resolved!!!
paul,
A restore changes the datestamp on the Norton products and the security products are very time sensitive [updates and all that] so it's going to some time of reinstall/install to fix that
Maybe a control panel unistall, reboot and reinstall will do the trick. Otherwise it's going to get a bit more difficult.
Keep us posted
It really doesn't change the date stamp. if a system is restored exactly like it was when it was imaged, it should work exactly like it did before. It should be just like a system that has been turned off for that length of time.
That said, I'm sure the problem is because it wasn't exactly restored.
Norton excludes the virus definitions and a few other things from volume shadow copy for reasons I never really understood.
I think they said something about if they didn't it would break system restore and that didn't make much sense to me alhough I would assume system restore would become huge if it was monitoring all the virus definition files that get updated and replaced every day. Ironically, thats the exact reason why using system restore breaks the product as well.
You can verify that by looking at these registry keys for Norton items:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToBackup
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\FilesNotToSnapshot
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BackupRestore\KeysNotToRestore
Since Ghost uses volume shadow copy, everything excluded from VSS is also going to be excluded from the image.
A couple years ago I remember a lot of people having problems with Norton products after doing a restore. Recently it seems like (at least for me) after doing a restore everything would work but the first time I ran live update it would have to re-download the entire definition set.
Since those keys are in the system registry, one way around it is to not use the system.
If I'm planning something like changing the hard drive I will always do a cold image from the recovery disk to ensure I get everything.
One time I had that same error in XP and fixed it by cleaning out the windows prefetch folder and rebooting twice but that was just after a version update.
Otherwise you will need to reinstall the product, go into the control panel and when you uninstall it you get an option to save all your settings and data and quarantine items. Use that option and then reboot and reinstall the product.
Dave
Can't you just manually update the virus defs?
redk9258 wrote:Can't you just manually update the virus defs?
Hi,
I think there's still a way to do it. It's been years since I had a need to do it so I've forgotten most of the details but I seem to remember a 'smart updater' or intelligent updater' which could be used to download virus updates and install them. My RAM isn't all that it used to be
Dick,
send a ewe into the pen.
Deric