Norton Ghost keeps giving me a hard drive full error when my hard drive is not nearly full.

I'm using Ghost 2002 and trying to back up a SATA Raid 0 set.  I'm storing the images on an IDE 100 MB Deathstar harddrive that is divided into 4 roughly equal FAT32 partitions.  The partition I'm backing up is about 15 GB with about 9 GB used.

I was able to sucessfully back up my drive several times.  A few weeks ago, it started giving me this hard drive full error.  It does the first half of the image just fine.  Then, it gets to the 2.7GB limit for a file and asks me what to name the next piece of the file (I have spanning turned on.)  After I name the file, it then says that my disk is full.

I tried turning autonaming on and letting Ghost name the next file itself, but I get the same error.  I also tried giving the second file a unique name and changing the extension, but neither one helped.  I tried putting the files on a completly empty partition (30 GB free) and still got the same error.  

I have tried different compression settings, including turning compression off, but I get the same error when it gets to the 2.7GB limit for the first piece of the file.  I also tried setting Ghost to start the second file piece at 2.5GB so that it wouldn't run into the 2.7 GB limit, but still got the error.

I keep thinking there has to be some little setting I can change to fix this, but I haven't been able to find anything helpful on Norton's web site.

Can anyone give me some advice?

MrMagoo

This is just a thought--I don't have personal experience with this problem--if one of the partitions can be *reformatted*--does that have any effect?

I had the same problem a couple years ago with ghost 2002. I finally gave up. I got ghost 2003 a while back and the problem is gone. I saw someone else in here with the same problem. but don't remember how it was solved, or if it was. I'll look to see if I can find it.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1122738319;start=7#7

http://forums.pcworld.co.nz/archive/index.php/t-19281.html

http://groups.google.com/group/24hoursupport.helpdesk/browse_thread/thread/373b6ed5473e5b49/fedbcb62c3ba48f7%23fedbcb62c3ba48f7?sa=X&oi=groupsr&start=2&num=3

MrMagoo

After thinking about it for awhile--I think that error often occurs when there is an incompatible hardware/software setup--it could be the SATA RAID 0 is not *understood* by Ghost 2002.

I didn't think Ghost 2002 supported SATA. I thought you need the latest version/update of Ghost 2003 for that.

I would not recommend using (relying upon) Ghost 2002 with SATA drives.

I would not recommend using Ghost 2002 for anything, actually .. uh, except restoring an image created with Ghost 2002.

Well, I have Norton System Works 2005 Pro, and it has Ghost 9.0 on it, but I've already had a bad experience with that.  I guess I'll look into some of the alternatives or see if I can get my hands on Ghost 2003.

MrMagoo


Quote:

I have Norton System Works 2005 Pro,

Ghost 2003 is also on the Norton SystemWorks 2005 Pro installation CD.  Were you planning on installing SystemWorks 2005?  

I'm not where my SystemWorks 2005 Pro CD is--so I can't tell you exactly where to look until this evening.

But, depending on whether you planned to install SystemWorks 2005 will determine what I answer later.

What OS are you using--(that also will influence my answer)?

Yes, Ghost 2003 comes with Ghost 9 .. must not have read the Rad guide .. shame.  :)

Read the guide, but I got it for free.  I wanted the utilities and the antivirus.  

I did find Ghost 2003 on the CD and tried that, but it can't even read the raid set.  It only sees the first disk of the set.  Spent the afternoon trying to get PC-Dos to understand the raid drivers to no avail.  PC-Dos just freezes right after it starts to load.  It doesn't even get to running autoexec.bat and trying to start ghost.

MrMagoo

You may have to try Ghost 9.x or 10.x in order to use Ghost with RAID 0.

Ghost 2003 works fine with RAID 1 on most systems.

Does Ghost 2003 see the combined *size* of the two HDD's that forms your RAID 0 array?  It may only list a single HDD, but if the size is the combined size, then you may be able to create a backup image of the data.

Do you have access to the data in the array when booting to DOS?

I've seen reports that RAID 0 has been successfully used with Ghost 2003 for a backup image of the data, but the restore can only be done to a single HDD and not a RAID 0 setup.

Ghost 2002 could see the whole array correctly and made a few successful backup images before it started acting up.  

Ghost 2003 seems to see only the first drive in the array and shows half the size of the whole array.  It doesn't even know the second hard drive is installed.  I tried to put my raid drivers on the floppy and add them to the config.sys, but PC-Dos froze as soon as it read config.sys.

I've made an image with Ghost 9 in the mean time, but I already had one bad experience with the hot imaging.

For anyone interested, I tried the Ghost 4 Linux and Ghost 4 Unix suggested in the guide, but both seems to be having trouble with my 64-bit processor.  Things are just more involved when your computer isn't "off the shelf"...  I'm thinking my next best bet might be DriveImage XML running from BartPE if I can't get Ghost working.  At least that will provide a safe environment for imaging and recovery.

Thanks for everyone's help so far.

Quote:

I'm thinking my next best bet might be DriveImage XML running from BartPE if I can't get Ghost working.  At least that will provide a safe environment for imaging and recovery.

MrMagoo, I like DriveImage XML. Let us know your assessment.
Ghost 9 can be run from BartPE too if you don't like hot imaging.

MrMagoo, Ghost 9.0 supports RAID 0 and 5 (see Symantec Knowledge Base Document ID 2004024963607262).

What is the "bad experience" you had with hot imaging?  Is there anything that you can share that will benefit the readers of this forum?

Basically, Rad's worst fears about hot imaging came true for me.  I installed a video card driver for an ATI card that conflicted badly with my chipset drivers.  I found my operating system unstable and wasn't able to fix it through extensive  troubleshooting.  

Confident that I had several Ghost 9 images on a physically seperate hard drive, I reinstalled my original hardware and poped in the restore CD.  In the end, one of my images was corrupt, another didn't restore correctly after several tries, and the third was so old that it wasn't of much use to me.  One image restored successfully, but Windows was unstable.  I kept getting random errors and reboots, and everytime the computer booted up it ran CheckDisk.  I put Norton's full System Works Suit to work on it, running every scan and utility included.  Each one would find errors and correct them but the problems continued.  I ended up completly reinstalling Windows, after which everything worked fine again.  That's why hot imaging makes me a little nervous now.

At the time, I had a mundane system with a 32-bit Athlon XP and two IDE drives and no RAID set.  However, I took the oppertunity to upgrade my system to a new NForce3 motherboard, Athlon64, and a two disk SATA Raid 0 set.  It was all very easy to set up and performance is outstanding for the money I spent, but I occasionaly run into these situations were some things (like backing up my computer) become much more difficult tasks.

Ok, I at the suggestion of the users of this google group (thanks to ckcc for the link):

http://groups.google.com/group/24hoursupport.helpdesk/browse_thread/thread/373b6ed5473e5b49/fedbcb62c3ba48f7%23fedbcb62c3ba48f7?sa=X&oi=groupsr&start=2&num=3

I tried reducing the file sizes to 650 MB and autonaming the next span.  I got the exact same error when the first file was full that I was getting before.  The users in that google group say it fixed the problem for them, so it might be something to do with my SATA RAID setup.  I'm still suprised that Ghost 2002 can read my Raid set just fine while Ghost 2003 cannot.  It seems like Ghost 2003 can see my two primary partitions but not my extended partitions.  I'm not sure if it would image the partitions it can see correctly or not since it isn't reading the whole disk.

I tried Drive Image XML and really like it so far.  I like how it stores the images in a non-proprietary format and the image files are easy to manipulate.  I haven't tired restoring the image yet because I don't have time to clean up the mess if it doesn't work, but I'll give it a full test run soon.  I think I'm going to run it off a BartPE CD so it can lock the drive and I don't have to worry about hot imaging.  I saw a tutorial on here somewhere on how to slipstream a raid driver into a boot disk like BartPE...  I'll have to see if I can find it again.  I'll let you all know how it works out.

Quote:

I saw a tutorial on here somewhere on how to slipstream a raid driver into a boot disk like BartPE...  I'll have to see if I can find it again.

Just put your floppy disc RAID driver files in the  BartPE  drivers\SCSIAdapter folder.

If you keep/make notes about your experiences with Drive Image XML, I'll update the guide to include your impressions.

Hi folks,

Just letting you know that I came accross the same message by trying to backup a local drive to a network share from DOS with Ghost 8. Tried everything without success. Now it's working and I simply copied the g80.exe to the network share and lauched it from there. I also included the -OR parameter to prevent ghost from checking disk space no other parameter where used. Hope that help you out.

MrMagoo wrote on Oct 24^th, 2005 at 3:35am:

Confident that I had several Ghost 9 images on a physically seperate hard drive, I reinstalled my original hardware and poped in the restore CD.  In the end, one of my images was corrupt, another didn't restore correctly after several tries, and the third was so old that it wasn't of much use to me.  One image restored successfully, but Windows was unstable.

MrMagoo,

I must have missed this post. Any further information about this situation with the corrupt Ghost 9 images. Were you verifying the images at the time of backup? Did you verify the images in the RE prior to restore? Did the images pass "verify" but wouldn't restore anyway? Was the storage HD OK?

I think that I did verify the image after creating it, but I don't remember if I verified before restoring.  It has been quit a while now...

I don't have any reason to place blame on the storage drive.  It was working fine at the time (although it has since failed due to a power surge.)

I don't have any further updates because I switched to Linux early this year.  Instead of Ghost, which can't read RiserFS or my software RAID, I now use a combination of cron, rsync, and tar to automatically backup my computer accross the network and compress the files on an automated schedule.