Norton Ghost and Mac OS Boot Camp WinXP Partition Restore

I had to restore the Windows XP partition on my Boot Camp Mac machine, and had a hard time finding any information about whether it could be done (and how to do it). The answer is yes, and it is relatively painless, and you can do it using Norton Ghost. You just need to boot from the Norton Ghost CD, and recover by restoring the Win XP image you hopefully made earlier and stored to an external device.

 

In case you haven't done this, when you boot from the Norton Ghost CD (version 10.0, anyway) on a Macbook, it appears as "Windows", just as if you were selecting between the Mac and Windows boot. It takes a long time to load, so be patient.

 

Next, it will automatically find all Ghost restore points on the attached drives. Select the one you want to restore. I used the custom restore, which failed, then the fast restore, which worked.

 

The trick seems to be to leave the "write MBR" option unchecked. I'm not sure why, but that's what worked. When I tried the custom settings, it got almost to the end but then reported failure. The fast restore (or whatever it's called) worked fine.

 

A better description of the more general process for recovering the Windows partition in a bootcamp setup can be found here:

 

Using Symantec Norton Ghost 14 on Bootcamp

 

I just thought I'd put this out there so others in my situation can find an answer faster than I did.

 

I'll be more careful now to keep my Norton Ghost images safer, like in two places instead of just one. Norton Ghost 15.0 can create copies of selected disk images to a second destination. Don't just drag and drop them, since Ghost needs to update its internal database in order to present them properly in the UI.

Welcome Ghostly,

Thank you for the very informative post. I've only one question. After the restore was it necessary to uninstall and reinstall yur Norton products, other than Ghost? It's been my experience that the changed timestamps and disk locations tend to cause Norton to fail.

Thanks

Hi Dick,

 

Thanks for the welcome.

 

I'm not sure I can answer your question helpfuly, since I don't have any other Norton software installed, only Ghost, which worked fine after the re-imaging of the WinXP partition. I did not need to reinstall Ghost or any other backup software.

 

After the re-imaging of the Win XP partition, Ghost "rediscovered" all the previous recovery points and reported them correctly.  I forced it to do a full backup image as soon as the system was back to normal, so I can't say what would have happened if its scheduled backup time rolled around. Normaly it would have done an incremental backup, but maybe with the timestamp issue it would have done a full backup on its own.

 

Here's the timeline in my scenario:

 

Wed - Everything OK

Thur - Everything SNAFU

Fri - Failed attempts at recovery (e.g. Windows repair using Win install disk)

Sat - Restored Win XP partition to Wed using Ghost

 

I didn't change any disk locations. The Ghost recovery points/backups were stored on an external drive, and I restored to the same partition. My data (documents, etc.) are on a separate partition that was unaffected.

 

But I can see where timestamps/file dates might mess things up for other types of backups (like "continuous" ones). Files saved or backed up on Thurs morning (before the SNAFU) could mess things up.  Upon the restore, the internal database of some backup software would show file timestamps for Wednesday, but the files themselves would be timestamped Thursday morning. Is that what you mean?

 

Also, I upgraded from Ghost 10.0 to Ghost 15.0 right away (after doing the new recovery point in 10.0) and the installation went perfectly. Ghost 15.0 found all the 10.0 recovery points.

 

Hope this helps!

Ghostly,

Again, thank you for the additional details. My interest was in any security software that was/is present. Since it appears there was none I have no questions. Only one suggestion - get some! :smileyvery-happy:

Do feel free to visit often and lend a hand assisting others.

Stay well and surf safe

Oh, now I understand what you mean. There is basic security on the machine (firewall, antivirus, etc.) but nothing monitoring "live". Nothing complained. Now you have me worried!  :-)