Restore Ghost Image Problem

[bevills1]

Recently I made the mistake, which I'll do never again, of starting to create a Ghost image using Ghost 2003 without creating the disaster recovery disk which I've don a dozen or so times without incident. However, this time I got "Missing OS" message instead of DR DOS starting Ghost like it normally does when creating Ghost image. I'd made a bootable Ghost CD and ran Ghost from it to try to restore image to partition from a previous image where Ghost showed the image and prompted to select destination to restore image, but all partitions were grayed out and not selectable. I bit the bullet and reinstalled Windows and all apps from scratch.

Does anybody know why all destination partitions were grayed out and whether there's a solution for this problem? Would running Ghost from the CD to create the partition that was attempted to be restored have averted this problem? What good is an imaging program if an image can't be restored due to destination to restore to being non selectable?

[jman98]

I'll make a guess, which might be right or wrong. One of the worst things about Windows is that I have seen disk drives get so corrupted under it that they cannot be saved. A complete reinstall is the only "fix". Perhaps your disk drive had such corruption and Ghost could not find the image you made.

The ONLY way to use Ghost and guarantee that what you back up with it will work is to buy a 2nd hard drive of the same size or larger than your boot drive, attach it to your PC, and use Ghost to make a disk to disk exact copy. Then remove the 2nd drive when done. This works. If your first drive gets hosed up, it doesn't matter because you can replace it with the 2nd and boot from that and then reformat and reuse the 1st drive. It's a lot of trouble, but that way of using Ghost does work reliably.

[ntscuser]

The ONLY way to use Ghost and guarantee that what you back up with it will work is to buy a 2nd hard drive of the same size or larger than your boot drive, attach it to your PC, and use Ghost to make a disk to disk exact copy. Then remove the 2nd drive when done. This works. If your first drive gets hosed up, it doesn't matter because you can replace it with the 2nd and boot from that and then reformat and reuse the 1st drive. It's a lot of trouble, but that way of using Ghost does work reliably.

Agree with all of that but you don't have to physically remove the 2nd drive after it's been formatted. You can leave it in the PC and set it to boot automatically if the primary hard drive fails. Any space left over can be used for page file or temporary file storage.

[bevills1]

All my Ghost images are stored on more than 1 separate partition so that I have a second or third backup in case one becomes corrupt. I finally engineered a way to get a good boot disc with Ghost 2003 on it to recognize all drives. I compiled a Nero CD image file and included contents of Windows 98 Startup disk and selected drive A for boot source when that option is given in Nero. It boots well, and Ghost 2003 recognizes all drives just fine. This eliminates the need to launch Ghost from Windows, have to reboot and create disaster recovery disk. BTW I also included contents of Windows 98 upgrade CD plus contents of folder containing Windows 3.1 which I previously copied from floppies. Now I'm able to setup Windows 98 upgrade version when needed without having to change disc or insert floppies in addition to running Ghost on same bootable disc.