Hi all,
I spent an hour and a half tonight — and two and a half hours last night — on the phone with Norton Tech Support, speaking primarily with a gentleman who identified himself as a "Senior Technician for Ghost."
I called because I have a full drive image that I need to restore to my C: drive, but the computer won't boot from either (i) the factory Ghost CD or (ii) my Custom SRD... even though the BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD drive first, and even though the computer will boot from (for example) the Windows OS reinstallation CD without any problem.
Per the instructions of the "Senior Technician," I tried booting from a USB stick onto which I had copied all of the files from the SRD CD (the booting order was set to accommodate this in the BIOS). The computer ignored that, as well, booting straight into Windows.
During tonight's conversation, I tried booting with the Ghost factory CD in three different machines. It turns out that the Ghost 15 factory CD was ignored during the boot process by one desktop (Win7x64, 16GB RAM) and a laptop (Win7x64, 6GB), but I did actually see a "Press any key to boot from CD" message on a different desktop (WinXPx86, 3GB RAM).
So finally, halfway through tonight's conversation, I was advised for the first time that I cannot boot from the CD on my Win 7 machines because they each have too much RAM installed (funny how this concept never came up during the previous night's marathon session).
The "Senior Technician" informed me that the SRD operates in "Windows Pre-Installation Mode," and therefore won't work in a machine that has more than 4GB of RAM in it. He suggested that I remove 12GB of RAM from the computer long enough to run the restoration, and then reinstall the RAM afterwards.
Um..... WHAT...?!?!?!?!?
He acknowledged that, in 2012, a consumer pretty much can't buy a machine with less then 4GB RAM pre-installed. Could it possibly be true that everyone with >4GB RAM is powerless to restore their C: drive images without shutting down the machine, climbing under the desk, unplugging everything, opening the chassis, removing all but one memory module, booting up into the Recovery Environment with the SRD, restoring the image, powering back down, climbing back down under the desk, replacing the RAM modules, closing the chassis, plugging everything back in and then rebooting again?
Although we were on the phone for an hour and a half, he was unable to point me to a single reference of this massive, critical shortcoming, anywhere on the Norton website.
How many people are living in a state of false security, backing their machines up regularly without any idea that they won't actually be able to restore any of these images should the need arise?
Please, someone, tell me this guy was way off-base.............
Thanks,
— Alan
ps — don't even get me started about the first guy I spoke with last night, who talked me into deleting the Active Partition from my machine and then gave up when Windows Disk Manager didn't allow any other partition to be set to Active... and who promised to give me an extra 60 days on my Ghost license as an apology for my having been disconnected/kept on hold for so long that night, only to transfer me to "an expert" before confirming that he had done so.........