Norton Ghost [OT]

[Steve Moore]

Q: Anybody out there have to create their own nic template to run peer to peer? Anybody running peer to peer at all?

After a recent crash wher PTLE trashed hal.ddl, the core file for XP... causing me to have to completely reinstall Windows.... (what's up with that DIGI?) I figured I would use Ghost as so many others do to make reconfiguration relatively painless.

The new version (2003) claims to work across network drives, an important issue for me since I want to be able to back up both system and audio drive images offsite to my servers with large raid arrays.

The advertisements make this sound like a Windows program with an intuitive GUI interface. BS. It's just a shell program that dumps to DOS and requires two reboots of your computer.

What's worse, is that the peer to peeer networking requires a DOS driver for your network card, something not explained up front and not necessarily available for the network adapter card already running in your computer (my card was installed using the XP supplied driver).

The list of accepted network cards recoginized by Ghost is very short... a handful of the many hundreds in use today. What's more, it can't seem to take this information from the OS. You would think with a working nic already installed in the OS it could extract the necessray information. Not so. Instead I am left with a cryptic dialog box asking me to create a template for my nic with little or no help/explantion whatsoever. Multiple attempts to provide Ghost with the OMF files have failed with cryptic error messages that that tell me nothing.

What's worse is I downloaded this pile from Best Buy with zero return policy. I guess I'm left with trying to get symantec on the phone again or spending more dollars still putting another nic in my machine that Ghost recognizes.

IMO, Norton should tell you upfront that the peer to peer feature they are boasting about has limitations.

Just my .02.

So, anybody else out there have to create their own nic template to run peer to peer? Anybody running peer to peer at all?

And for all the hype, it does not even appear to have an automatic scheduler to keep the images up to date..! And since the damn tbing requires two reboots how can I use a Windows scheduler to do this.

Oh and one more thing... the supplied help files won't open (I click on help and nothing happens) and of course there was no printed documentation because I downloaded the program directly from Best Buy.

Arghhh!

[Booyah]

dont have an answer for your Nic template question but are you talking about regular Norton Ghost 8 or Corporate Edition?

The Corporate version of Ghost 8 is designed to let IT sysadmins ghost/unghost client computers from the windows managment console, cant comment about the Basic Ghost 8 you would buy in a local computer store or the one included with Systemworks.

[tele_player]

Symantec's marketing department should be shot, or they should be rewarded - depends on your perspective.

The packaging and web information regarding Ghost 2003 is completely misleading and deceptive. The situation with Firewire drives is similar to what's described above for network use. The GUI program pretends to know what to do with Firewire drives, but it doesn't really work, and their support info online is no help at all.

The GUI notices when you name a Firewire drive, and installs a DOS Iomega driver for the Firewire. I fiddled with it a little bit, gave up before getting it to work.

I paid about $70, and it's useless for my original intended use. It works fine on directly connected IDE drives, anything else, all bets are off, in spite of their claims.

[Steve Moore]

Ghost 2003 - all its called.... no nothing of Ghost 8 or Ghost Corp. Nortons page claims backup restore over peer to peer networks and a new improved Windows GUI interface. Truth in advertising? Where?

[mlemos]

I have to agree with you guys. I bought Ghost 2003 and can't really do any of the things that I originally bought it for. The documentation is bad and their online knowledge base is even worse. I think that they make good products but they really have to cut down on the bs.

Marc

[PDEES]

It works fine on directly connected IDE drives, anything else, all bets are off, in spite of their claims.

Not necessarily working fine for me on connected IDE. Ghost copies every single file, yet when I swap HDs as master and remove the original HD, XP just hangs and hangs and hangs on the blue XP screen of death. Never get a full bup. (XP mulit media center)

[QuikDraw]

Not necessarily working fine for me on connected IDE. Ghost copies every single file, yet when I swap HDs as master and remove the original HD, XP just hangs and hangs and hangs on the blue XP screen of death. Never get a full bup. (XP mulit media center)

Sometimes Ghost will write incorrect information to the drive's MBR if the drive is not identical to the one that the image came from. To fix this use the Recovery Console to repair the MBR using the FIXBOOT and/or FIXMBR command(s) to write a new MBR to the newly imaged drive.

Also, sometimes Ghost will not set the partition to Active when you place an image on a new drive. Use FDISK to set the partition to active in this case.

These commands, though usually safe, can be destructive. Make sure your data is backed up before performing any of the above repair techniques! (You've been warned)

Mike

[JPS]

I found that the firewire connection works if I use the onboard firewire port. The ports from the SIIG PCI card, which I use for the 002r, did not work.

Don't pay $70 for Norton Ghost. Buy the OEM disk of Norton System Works 2003 from Newegg for $23, which includes Norton Ghost 2003, plus anitvirus and some other stuff.

[1Nation]

Man, I'm glad I saw this thread. I've been thinking about buying Ghost. Isn't there another program that does the same thing? I think it might be called drive image. Is that one any better?

[JMS40]

I've been looking at Drive Image 7 which is supposed to allow you to work inside windows.
Anyone using this?