I've been religiously backing up to an external USB hard drive with Norton Ghost 15 for over a year now, and it seems to work fine. However, after making a custom SRD and testing it, I've found I can't "see" the external USB hard drive (even though it is plugged in and working when I boot with the SRD). The external is a Toshiba Canvio 1TB USB 3 drive. I've tried restarting into the recovery environment with the external drive plugged into a USB 2 port - same thing, I cannot "see" the drive.
Fortunately I've never had to do a recovery, but I'd like to be prepared in case I have a crash and have to do it down the road.
I've been religiously backing up to an external USB hard drive with Norton Ghost 15 for over a year now, and it seems to work fine. However, after making a custom SRD and testing it, I've found I can't "see" the external USB hard drive (even though it is plugged in and working when I boot with the SRD). The external is a Toshiba Canvio 1TB USB 3 drive. I've tried restarting into the recovery environment with the external drive plugged into a USB 2 port - same thing, I cannot "see" the drive.
Fortunately I've never had to do a recovery, but I'd like to be prepared in case I have a crash and have to do it down the road.
Thanks for your prompt reply and quick detective work.
Can you talk me through how to delete and re-create the partition on the F: drive? I know how to get to Disk Management in Windows 7, but beyond that is beyond my skill level without some tutelage.
Found a partition tutorial and did as you suggested, and it works. After deleting and re-creating the partition, SRD can see the recovery points with the drive plugged into a USB 2 port, but not a USB 3 one.
Not a problem, Brian. I figured that's what happened. I get a little skittish doing things I've never done before, like messing with partitions. It certainly didn't hurt me to find the Windows tutorial and figure it out, heck, I actually learned something.
From what I've been reading, USB 3 performance with Ghost has been spotty at best. Guess when I make the move to SSR we'll see what happens.
Yes, I did. After I moved the files temporarily onto my C: drive, in Windows 7 Disk Management I right clicked on the F: drive and selected "Delete Volume," leaving everything on that drive as unallocated space. I right clicked on that space and created a volume (750GB), giving the same drive letter as before (F). I then moved the files back onto that partition, and ran another full backup. After that, I booted into the recovery environment using the custom SRD I'd made with the external USB drive plugged into a USB 3 port, but couldn't "see" the recovery points under the "Restore" computer option. I shut the computer down, then plugged the external drive into a USB 2 port, and re-booted with the SRD. I could see the recovery points then.