I had so much trouble with ghost 10 I asked for and received a refund. I then tried livestate recovery which is basically ghost 10 with some extra options and about $20 more. Doing the first backup it stopped at about 30% with the error message ebab001a-an unknown exception has occurred. Totally frustrated I checked the firewire drive in device manager. I thought I'd done this before with ghost but anyway I noticed write back caching was disabled. I enabled it to see what happened. This time the backup got to 70% when this error message showed up-object of reference not set to an instance of an object. After clicking the ok button the backup continued and finished successfully. I was still concerned about the second error. I googled this and one of the posts said this error was a windows error and occurred when remote access connection manager and telephony are turned off in services. I had them turned off in a too aggressive attempt at optimization. I turned them on and was able to do a full  backup successfully. The rescue disk recognized the firewire drive.  I don't know if this was what was keeping ghost 10 from working but maybe it can help someone else.  8)

Larry,

Did you ever try writing an image to the HD with the Firewire drive not attached to your computer?

Thx for sharing your experience. No doubt others will google and find this. Good digital karma 4 u.

Brian, no I never did.

Larrycleve, good to hear that you 'resurrected' the Ghost and all is well.

Can you kindly summarize the most important differences you observed between Ghost 10.0 and LiveState Recovery?  What does the extra $20 really provide for a home users of Ghost?

I'm really pleased you have LSR working, Larry. What an interesting observation about the services.

If you decide to experiment with Write Caching could you let us know if it  makes a difference to the speed of image creation?

Since everything's working I'm not going to play around changing anything. Livestate recovery is the new incarnation of v2i protector. I used v2i protector for years with good results. I started looking for a new program when v2i started acting a little flaky. It still made perfect full backups but instead of an incremental backup it made another full backup. This took up a lot of space. It also started running real slow on another computer. I didn't play with the other computer so maybe the slowness had something to do with sp2? Maybe the problem with not getting an incremental was due to all the playing around I did with the first computer? I think livestate recovery may be more stable than ghost. The interface is identical but this is an enterprise version. Since it's made for business I would think they would want it more reliable than the consumer version. In any case I don't mind paying $20 more for something that's reliable.   :D

Larry, do you have version 6 of LSR?

No, version 3.0. Since I just got this and it works I don't know if there is any reason to upgrade.

I also used v2i Protector in the past. I liked it and found it very similar to Ghost 9. It was closer to Ghost 9 than was Drive Image 7. DI 7 didn't have incremental backups.

I gather ver 3 of LSR has been available for a year and resembles Ghost 10 in features. Is that your impression?

The interface between lsr 3 and ghost 10 is identical, lsr just gives a few extra options. I'm not sure what the difference is between 3 and 6.