problems with norton ghost 9

ewokuk

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Joined
8 Jan 2004
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Basically i want to mirror my drive onto an old backup drive so that if this drive drops dead, i just plug the other one in. Im running xp pro, sp2 and norton ghost 9. My primary drive is 80gb with a 68gb partition and a 12gb. My backup drive is a 28gb.

I have 25gb of data on the drive i want to back up, me 28gb drive is empty and quite obviously has more then enough space on it to back up 25gb of data, unless my maths is suddenly bad and 25 no longer fits into 28. I am selecting the drive copy since i want a working backup copy, not an image.

So why the hell is ghost telling me there is not enough space on the destination drive to back up the data?!?!?!?!?! I select the destination drive, click next and get the most rediculous unhelpful error box saying "Unable to update settings. The selected destination is too small to hold the data. The parameter is incorrect". WHAT THE HELL? things like this really piss me off. Theres CLEARLY more than enough space for 25gb of data on an empty 28gb drive.

I previously tried acronis trueimage 8 only to be told the same thing. now either im imssing something or these programs are too damn stupid to do very very basic maths. I have tribple checked how much data is on this drive and there IS only 26560mb used, the destination has 28105mb free, and this is according to ghost itself, as well as windows explorer.
 
Do either of these applications need extra space, bit like when you burn cd's says make sure you have at least 1 gigabyte of free space when burning it. Maybe it requires a heap of extra space to accomplish the task, or a different file system means less space or something.
 
ntfs on both, 4k clusters on both, and neither of the apps will be touching the drives, its ghost - all it does is mirror the drive making an identical copy.
 
I think Ghost sees 68 GB partition regardless of how much data is on it.
Not sure though. :confused:
 
thats possible but that would be really stupid for such a well used and mature program on version 9 (and acronis on version 8)! and the program gives no indication what so ever that it is looking for a 68gb destination.

now i just went the other way round and told it to copy my old drive to my normal drive, the next screen then gives options to resize the destination drive to fill unallocated space, disabled smartsector copying (it copies only clusters containing data by default). So theres absolutely no reason why it cannot copy 25gb of data on my drive onto 27gb on another!
 
Actually, depending on how many copies you want to make, Norton Ghost 9 requires at least double the size of the drive you want to backup. Let's say, if you only want one copy, then it indeed requires double the size of the drive you want to backup. This is because, once there's already a backup, it makes another one next to the existing backup and only when the new backup is done, it'll delete the other one. And so on.

Edit: How about DOS' XCOPY command? :D
 
I have no clue what your talking about but its clearly wrong, unless of course for some reason you are talking about backup onto the same drive then you would obviously need double the space. I have already mentioned im doing a ghost not a backup.

I managed to getit to work by moving 1.5gb off my drive onto my other partition then trying it again and this time it agreed to do it (despite the drive holding 29gb vs the 25gb that windows and ghost says i have on my c drive before i moved anything). So it agreed to do it when it was 23.5gb onto 29gb drive, but refused when it was 25gb onto 29gb drive. now thats just stupid, something very very strange is going on there. Now I could understand it if windows was somehow reporting incorrect drive space, but ghost reports the same thing and i dont expect ghost to report it wrongly. I also did a checkdisk before i tried it.

either way the ghost then failed after 17 mins with some error about being unable to read or copy one of the sectors then something about it being past the end of the drive, so ive given up trying to back it up onto that drive now anyway, ill just have to buy a raptor to use as my primary drive and use this WD SE as the backup drive if i want to make backups.
 
Don't bother with Ghost 9

The "copy drive" functionality of Ghost 9 is terrible (in my personal experience). It tries to do the copy while Windows is active and this simply can't be done. You end up with a slightly corrupted copy. I've tried this several times with various options and it's never been a good enough copy to actually use. That's when it actually completes without errors. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Their tech support is terrible as well, unless you want to shell out more money for them to tell you how badly the product you just purchased is screwed up and that you'll need to wait for the next update. I'm also running XP Pro SP2 so perhaps that's part of the problem or perhaps not. I don't see any point wasting my time trying it on an SP1 machine when other drive copying tools are available that actually work :mad:
Ghost 2003 is decent though, not outstanding, but at least it actually works more often than not.
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
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Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
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