I made a complete backup of all 4 partitions on my Dell Inspiron 1520. The partions were DellUtility, Recovery (D:\), OS (C:\) and MediaDirect, in that order. The DellUtility and MediaDirect were hidden partitions, so I had to check the "show hidden drives" option in Ghost when creating the multi disk backup (I selected all 4 "disks" / partitions).
The backup worked fine to my external USB drive. I replaced the hard drive with a new one from Dell, with the same size and specs. I booted the Norton Ghost 14 recovery disk, and attempted to restore the 4 partions in the backup set. The restore worked correctly, but restored the partions in a different order and geometry than the original drive. Windows Vista booted and worked normally. However, the other three partitions were there with data (I could see the Recovery information on the D:\ drive (partition) but none of the other partions worked properly. MediaDirect would crash the machine when I powered it up and pressed the MediaDirect button. When I ran diagnostics and it attempted to boot the DellUtility diagnostics, it failed. When I tried the Repair option after booting to attempt to restore the drive to factory condition, it also failed. Only the Windows Vista restored partion would work correctly.
I could find nothing wrong, so I repeated the backup with the original drive, and the restore with the new drive, with the same results. Norton Ghost 14 is not able to recreate the original disk in working order for the backups it creates, or I am doing something wrong that is not obvious. I'm not pleased with this functionality. I simply want to replace a disk drive that is beginning to fail. At least Ghost could restore the operating system so the laptop is usable, but I'm not happy about losing the other functions. Any advice?
I am running Windows Vista Home Premium on a factory installed Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop. I have a disk to reinstall MediaDirect, but it requires that I use some Dell utility on the disk that wipes and repartitions the hard drive. I tried this and then restored only the OS partition, but the restore seems to screw up the partitions set up by the MediaDirect disk, because after the recovery it tells me I have to re-run the MediaDirect utility that wipes the drive again.