First off, some particulars about the new system customer purchased. I purchased Norton Ghost 15 from NewEgg with an external enclosure and Seagate 7200rpm HDD intended as the backup/recovery solution. I added the Firewire interface card/cable to the computer to accelerate data transfer to/from the external HDD (instead of using USB 2.0).
The machine that customer purchased from Best Buy:
HP Pavilion Magnesium Gray Edition p6674y 'P6000 Series'
Serial 4CE03217ZQ
AMD Phenom II 820 Quad-Core
6GB DDR3 RAM
1TB Seagate HDD (7200rpm)
Wireless LAN (a/b/g/n) built in
Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit (Ghost says it is compatible with all 32 and 64-bit versions of Win 7)
I installed Norton Ghost 15 shortly after setup and installation of NIS, latest Windows Security Updates and Office 2007. I ran the backup of C:, D:, and the System partitions. Everything seemed fine.
Then, on my first re-boot after attempting to copy some directories from a recovered partition (another external drive) from the XP machine I was migrating from, the computer started displaying the dreaded "BOOTMGR is missing" msg (even with the external Norton backup drive turned off).
At this point, I attempted to recover the Seagate drive from the backups... no improvement.
Final resort, I recovered from the D: Recovery partition to the factory image and repeated my installation steps.
Then, I tried installing Norton Ghost. Installation seemed fine until I attempted to use the 'Wizard' feature and it would not detect or offer C:, D: and the System partitions as drives to backup (only the external Norton drive which was the destination... not what I needed to backup).
At this point, I tried a reformat of the external backup drive (oh, and I started getting the "BOOTMGR..." msg whenever the external backup drive was on and connected. Disconnecting and re-booting the machine stopped the msg but the inability to detect C, D and System persisted.
I tried removal and re-install of Norton Ghost 15. No change.
First attempt at a Norton Ghost board/forum and I saw a post where a solution was to 'shrink' C: and D: by some 8Mb. I reduced both by about 12Mb. No improvement. I can see the drives of course via the 'Computer' view and of course, the machine boots fine as long as the external drive is not running when the machine starts (I hope to resolve that also).
So, current status is I've installed Ghost but it doesn't see the drives to backup. I DID remove Norton Ghost 15 and then removed Norton Online Storage (NOS came pre-installed on the machine) and re-installed Ghost hoping it was just a conflict with NOS. No improvement.
I pitched 'Ghost' as a solid backup/recovery solution after excellent experience using it to manage backup of my HP notebook running Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit; no issues with that installation whatsoever. I also installed a similar solution (licensed) for a small business customer running Windows Vista Pro (32-bit); no issues and I even recovered that machine using Ghost since I backed up the HDD using Ghost after recovering lost sectors.
I'm to return to the customer site on Friday and hope to have a patch/solution from Symantec that will sort this out for me. Since it is Windows 7, 64-bit, my Paragon Partition Manager v11 (32-bit) isn't any use and Computer/Manage doesn't offer much functionality besides shrinking/expanding/deleting/formatting... the 'drives' in question.