Norton Ghost Does Not Detect C: and D: drives/partitions... Only the External Norton Backup Drive

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.

Details of my 'copy drive' operation:

 

I performed a partition-level copy/repair as part of my efforts to recover the customer's lost HDD after her Gateway desktop running XP Home Premium crashed and the failing 80GB IDE drive tested with bad sectors and critical diagnostic errors.  I removed the failing drive and put it in an external enclosure and, using Paragon Partition Manager v11 32-bit (PPM), copied the entire partition of the failing drive (C:) to a SATA drive in another enclosure (both are/were in NTFS format).  I performed other actions to recover the file system. 

 

My lofty goal was to recover to another IDE drive, boot the Gateway up using that drive and to THEN migrate/export the contents of selected folders from the Gateway to the HP.  Once I realized the Gateway had more issues than just a failing drive, (it completely refused to boot from any drive after I loaded a spare 120GB HDD with the image), I narrowed my focus to recovery of documents, images, music, and some Quicken 3 database files from customer's machine. However, my first attempt at migrating data also included migrating folders with programs along with them... bad idea...

 

I created a 76GB partition on the customer's internal Seagate drive and, using PPM running on a Win XP PRO machine managed that drive and the 1GB external drive with the corresponding 76GB partition (recovered).  When I attempted to move multiple directories from the 76GB partition on the HP Seagate drive, my problems began.  That was a bad idea and I know that now.  I should have avoided directories with programs/executables.  Since I have recovered the HP machine (C:, D:, and System partitions) using the factory partition on D:, I've selectively copied Directories from the (XP) partition from an external drive to the customer's machine using USB 2.0 attachment between the customer's machine and the external drive. 

 

However, I NOW have the Norton Ghost 15 issue to resolve since it cannot see C:, D: and 'System' as partitions to backup.  Also, the HP runs fine but, if the external enclosure/HDD is attached and the system is booted I get the dreaded "BOOTMGR is missing" msg at startup.

 

Help in resolving these issues will be greatly appreciated.

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.

At this time, the only external drive attached to the customer's HP machine is an active/formatted/lettered 500GB Seagate drive with the sole role/purpose of Norton Ghost backup/recovery drive.  I detached the external drive that had the 76GB XP image. Once the factory image (from D:) was laid down by Windows Recovery, the internal Seagate drive had only the C:, D: and System partitions; the 76GB XP partition is completely gone.

 

Should I mark the external backup/recovery drive as 'Inactive' to resolve the "BOOTMGR is missing" msg that appears to result since the external drive is not bootable?

 

I'll run the partinfo utility you mentioned from the Seagate cd to generate stats on C:, D: and System and post them here once I return to the customer site at 1pm ET today.  Thanks for your help.

Visited the customer site today.  Didn't run partinfo but wanted to share the following info from the Partition Table Editor view:

 

Type  Boot  Start Cyl  Start Head  Start Sector  End Cyl  End Head  End Sector  Sectors B4      Sectors After

07      80      0               32                33                  12            223             19                  2048                 204800

07      80      1023        254              63                  1023       254             63                  1927985152   25534913

07      00      12             223             20                   1023      254             63                   206848            1927769867

00      00      0               0                  0

 

I'm concerned that the 2nd and 3rd partitions share the same 'end' Cyl, Head and Sector' values

The system has three partitions:  System, C:, and D:  Recovery with following space numbers

 

System   104,853,504

C:             987,009,904,640

D:             12,957,249,536

I am wondering if I may effect a repair and resolve the Norton Ghost 15 issues I am having by performing the following:

 

Wipe/Format an external 1TB HDD (I keep several handy for utility)

 

Perform partition move/copies from the customer's 1TB Seagate HDD to the empty external 1TB HDD (noting the Partition Types, Boot flag, Active and Hidden flags, etc. of each partition)

 

Delete the partitions from the internal HDD (I'll remove it and have it in an external enclosure)

 

Move the saved partitions to the freshly re-formatted 'internal' Seagate 1TB HDD.

 

I'll be using Paragon Partition Manager Pro v11.0 for Windows 7 64-bit

TedH,

 

We need to see a partinfo.

 

I assume there is a typo in the Partition Table Editor data as you have two active partitions.

TedH,

 

Your client must be an extremely patient person.