I found this forum trying to search up information about using E-sata with Norton Ghost 2003 and found a number of threads that ended up confusing me. 

I have an HP DV8125NR running WinXP. Nothing special is going on, except with the addition of a PPA E-Sata II express card.

http://www.ppa-usa.com/products/pcmcia/1165.htm

I have two drives in a simple case with E-sata cables between the card and the case (which has just a fan and power supply). So far everything has been fine.  I have copied gigabytes of files back and forth many times.

I've had a copy of Ghost 2003 probably since 2003. It served me well for years. However when trying to ghost or clone some drives my computer kept shutting down before completion. This I found to be nothing more than a dust problem, so I successfully cloned the OS drive to a larger capacity 2.5" laptop IDE drive.

My main purpose with this setup was to start ghosting the OS drive periodically after cloning it to the new drive. This where the problems really began.

In attempting to ghost the internal IDE drive to an external ESATA drive I had nothing but a string of failures with the same error code (40204) because of the inability of Ghost to see the Esata drive.

Because I'm using two external drives I tried again with both plugged in. No change. I finally went through all the twists and turns to live update twice to the most recent Ghost 2003 build. No change. I went to the Jmicron website and downloaded their latest drivers and installed them. No change once again. I did my research and tried some of the switches (niode, fni) and again the results were the same. I tried running Ghost mixing and matching settings, turning on and off disk indexing, switching between disk caching on and quick removal, etc., etc! No change!

I read through everything on this and other sites but it looks like I reached a dead end. If thats the case and Ghost 2003 will just not see the ESATA drive (at least on my system) then I ask you this:

1) What suggestions do you have that I haven't tried?

2) Will an ESATA drive in a USB 2.0 or Firewire case work instead of Esata direct through the Esata express card? I mean an enclosure with internal SATA and external USB or FW.

3) I've seen little USB 2.0 to Esata bridges for about $10. Would they appear to Ghost 2003 as simple USB drives or would it reject my Esata drive anyway? Below is a link to one of these things:

http://www.amazon.com/eSATA-SATA-Bridge-Adaptor-PG-102/dp/B002RSOSBA

Any help or suggestions or ideas are greatly appreciated!

St-vs-Sp

@ stun vs spock

I'm not a Ghost 2003 user.

Just a comment on my Silicon Image Sil 3132 SATALink Controller (PCI). Ghost 2003 sees my external HD connected to this card.

Hi Brian

It may be a case of Esata not being recognized, or the chip set causing the problem.

I'd like to hear from anyone who has tried those little USB/Esata bridges or put a SATA drive in a USB/Firewire box.

St-vs-Sp

@ stun vs spock


stun vs spock wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2010 at 7:00pm:

or put a SATA drive in a USB/Firewire box

I've got a SATA HD in a USB box. Ghost 2003 sees the HD.

Quote:

I've got a SATA HD in a USB box. Ghost 2003 sees the HD.

Maybe thats the way to go, though I was hoping to avoid yet another box and transformer. I'll wait a week or two to see if anyone had any luck with these express card sata hookups first.

Thanks
St_vs_Sp

I put my backup drive in a Mac Ally  usb2/firewire/esata external box and connected to my laptop (described above) via firewire.

The ghost operation ran up to the dos screen and immediately gave the "divide overflow" error. I haven't tried any switches yet (NOIDE, FNI, etc) but from what I read in other forums there have been people with the same problem when using a 1TB or larger drive (mine is a Seagate 1.5TB).

I've searched in this forum but have yet to find any direct suggestions. I don't want to use any kind of boot CD. This thing should work as is or for me its time to move to another program.

st-vs-sp

@ stun vs spock

Your external HD is a lot larger than mine.

Could you do me a favour and try Image for Linux? There is a one month trial. I've found it very good with external devices and restoring images over a network. A Win7 restore over my network yesterday took 3 minutes. HD failure so I was restoring to a new HD.

IFL works with Windows and Linux.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image-for-linux.htm

IFL boots from a CD, a USB flash drive or a HD partition. I was using it on a USB flash drive containing several other ISOs, booted by grub4dos. It's very handy to have so many recovery apps on the one flash drive.

@ stun vs spock


Quote:

The ghost operation ran up to the dos screen and immediately gave the "divide overflow" error. I haven't tried any switches yet (NOIDE, FNI, etc) but from what I read in other forums there have been people with the same problem when using a 1TB or larger drive (mine is a Seagate 1.5TB).

Ghost 2003 Destination Drive Size Limits?--see Dan Goodell's Reply #3!

You could partition the 1.5TB drive into 1TB or smaller partitions which should allow Ghost 2003 to recognize those 1TB or smaller partitions.  Another option is to use the free download and install of Seagate DiscWizard instead of Ghost.  FYI there's a link to the work around to use DiscWizard with non Seagate drives in reply #9 at http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1215133362, and confirmation it works in reply #26 of same thread. 

@ Tator


Quote:

You could partition the 1.5TB drive into 1TB or smaller partitions which should allow Ghost 2003 to recognize those 1TB or smaller partitions.

I've never had a drive size limitation on my system--(I have *small* drives  ;) !)  Have you had an opportunity to use this *workaround*?  Does it work?  So, it's not the *total* drive size, but the individual partition sizes that make Ghost 2003 choke?


@ stun vs spock

Could you try making multiple partitions on your drive that are less than 1 TB,  and let us know the results?!

Yes, I used the work around to create image of a Dell laptop non Seagate drive to external USB drive and then restore that image to larger replacement laptop drive.   I don't know for sure partitioning to 1 TB or smaller partitions will work with Ghost 2003 but only suspect that it will.  Perhaps stun vs spock could let us know whether that works if he tries that.

Thank you all for the suggestions and links, some of which I'd already seen during my 4am nightly struggles with this.

A quick note: I used Gpart live CD to create a new partition (500GB) after resizing the main partition to 1TB. I tried to Ghost to the 500GB partition but it failed with none other than "divide overflow."

Would the partition type make any difference (logical, extended, primary)?

Maybe Ghost 2003 dislikes Seagate Barracuda drives....

st-vs-sp

@ stun vs spock


Quote:

Maybe Ghost 2003 dislikes Seagate Barracuda drives....

My bet is Ghost 2003 can't deal with drives greater than approx. 1 TB total size!

Quote:

My bet is Ghost 2003 can't deal with drives greater than approx. 1 TB total  size!

highly logical based on the available evidence.

though it is quite illogical to have any emotional attachment to a software program, i admit to such in the case of ghost 2003. interesting.

however i am now searching for alternatives and it appears that some of the open-source linux-based live CD tools are more than adequate in combination.

last night i tested gparted and ping, both of which worked exactly as described.

@ brian

i took a look at the linux-based program you mentioned and it may be worth a try. i'll post back here when i have the results.

compared to the $69 for ghost 15 and the potential for snags given its windows base, the $30 for a live CD linux-based alternative seems to be an excellent deal.

if anyone has any other linux-based alternatives to suggest, please do.

so far none of the programs i've tried have had any difficulty recognizing or working with any kind of drive (pata, sata, usb, firewire, esata).

st-vs-sp

@ stun vs spock

I'm going for the TeraByte's group of Image for Windows, DOS, and Linux when the time comes!

stun vs spock, were the partitions you created logical drives/partitions?  It shouldn't matter if they are primary or extended as long as they are logical, but Ghost might have problems if they are dynamic.  I have no experience using dynamic drives and don't know whether Ghost will work with them or not.

Are you running Ghost from within Windows or from boot floppy or boot CD?  I don't know if it'd make any difference, but it'd be interesting to know.

Some of the other imaging programs I've tried failed to boot when the image was restored.  Others can't restore image of a larger drive to a smaller drive even when the data space is less than the smaller drive capacity.  Some are limited to WinXP or later, and I have multi boot systems including Win98 and Win2k.  For these reasons I decided to choose Seagate DiscWizard because it works with all Windows versions I've tried, and it works faster than Ghost 2003.  DiscWizard may also be included in a BartPE CD which may include other utilities as well instead of having to have one CD for imaging and one or more other CDs to run other utilities one may want or need to run.  Don't forget DiscWizard is free as well, and it's based on Acronis which is highly rated by many users.

@nightowl

the time came for me and i bought it. i'll get back to you on how it compares to ghost2003.

@tator

thank you for the suggestions. i went to the limit of my patience trying to get ghost2003 to work with 1T and larger drives (SATA, that is). at a certain point i was wasting time that's worth far more than 30,40, 50 bucks. its taken me a long time to learn that there's a certain point where its time go for the obvious.

about the partitions i wasn't using dynamic - just the regular stuff.

after a week or so up til 4am (and looking and feeling it) i have to agree with s*y*m*a*n*tek: ghost003 doesn't work with large drives - divide overflow.

man, i don't mind telling you i think simon-tek are a bunch of **** dirty rats. i don't think it would have cost them much at all to fix the drive size problem in 2003. i wouldn't mind if they charged $30 for it and called it 2003/2010 or something.

about disk wizard, i agree its not bad, but i want something that covers almost all eventualities and drive image looks to be the one.

it looks to me for certain now that the best way to go anymore is open-source or small companies.

to everyone still using "old" or "dated" drives, OS, motherboards, or applications - keep on going! because i'm doing video i need the drive space but i'm sticking with XP. i use ME for a few specialized applications. W2K is great but i can't run everything on it.

i'm stopping with XP. after that it'll be linux for me. i'm already off the wagon, but probably will be using XP for years with all the time, energy and money invested (like billions of others).

if it doesn't slow you down at all, there's no reason to get rid of it.

st-vs-sp

@ stun vs spock


stun vs spock wrote on Mar 16^th, 2010 at 12:44am:

the time came for me and i bought it.

I'm curious. What did you buy?

@brian

i bought what you suggested i try out - thanks for the suggestion! tonight i'm going to put it to work.

@ stun vs spock

Nice. You will have TBOSDT Pro as well. An unsung piece of software. It is great when restoring an image to different hardware results in a non booting OS. On the non booting OS you can install IDE or SATA drivers as well as changing the HAL. To get the new computer to boot. I've been playing with this lately.

Many programs require Windows, and some sites require Internet Explorer.  I'd suggest making multi boot Windows and Linux when you think your done with Windows in case you may need it.  I still have multi boot Windows  including Win98 because some older apps either don't run on WinXP or run less well on WinXP.  I use Win98 only for older apps and run WinXP for everything else.

@ Tator

I have about 20 bootable partitions on my HD0, but not including Win98. Out of interest I tried to install Win98 last year but towards the end of the install I received an error message saying I didn't have enough memory. I have 2 GB RAM. Win98 will run in a virtual machine in this computer.

Have you seen this error message?

I installed Win98 in the normal way and have not tried it in a virtual machine.  My system has 512MB RAM, and I've received no insufficient memory messages.  However, I have had issues with Win98 Fdisk not correctly recognizing drive size of larger hard drives, and I had to partition and format such drives in Win2k or WinXP after which Win98 recognized drive partitions as long as it didn't exceed the 137GB limit for Win98.  I'd guess Win98 might have issues with larger amounts of RAM too, but that's just speculation by me. 

You might try installing Win98 with less RAM in the PC and then install the full 2GB RAM if Win98 installs with less RAM.  It may or may not work, but it wouldn't hurt to try.

stun vs spock wrote on Mar 16^th, 2010 at 4:32pm:

@tator thank you for the suggestions. i went to the limit of my patience trying to get ghost2003 to work with 1T and larger drives (SATA, that is). at a certain point i was wasting time that's worth far more than 30,40, 50 bucks. its taken me a long time to learn that there's a certain point where its time go for the obvious. about the partitions i wasn't using dynamic - just the regular stuff. after a week or so up til 4am (and looking and feeling it) i have to agree with s*y*m*a*n*tek: ghost003 doesn't work with large drives - divide overflow. man, i don't mind telling you i think simon-tek are a bunch of **** dirty rats. i don't think it would have cost them much at all to fix the drive size problem in 2003. i wouldn't mind if they charged $30 for it and called it 2003/2010 or something. about disk wizard, i agree its not bad, but i want something that covers almost all eventualities and drive image looks to be the one. it looks to me for certain now that the best way to go anymore is open-source or small companies. to everyone still using "old" or "dated" drives, OS, motherboards, or applications - keep on going! because i'm doing video i need the drive space but i'm sticking with XP. i use ME for a few specialized applications. W2K is great but i can't run everything on it. i'm stopping with XP. after that it'll be linux for me. i'm already off the wagon, but probably will be using XP for years with all the time, energy and money invested (like billions of others). if it doesn't slow you down at all, there's no reason to get rid of it. st-vs-sp

stun vs spock,

I got very long hours of hands on tests with whole bunch of USB 2.0/SATA, USB2.0/PATA HDDs, Flash Drives in the past 2 weeks. I even bought a Seagate 1TB USB2.0/SATA Expansion HDD just for the test because the only one failed case in using a Hitachi 1TB SATA HDD might not be convicing enough to convict the failure of the Ghost 2003 dealing with 1TB HDD.

My conclusion is the same as yours: Ghost 2003, even with the most-up-to-date build of .793, can not handle any HDD of capacity larger than (in my case, it is equal to) 1TB, period.

As whether it is an easy job to fiddle the Ghost 2003 source code to fix this problem, I am not so sure as you. In the digital world, even one single line change to the codes need to go through the complete test cycle to verifiy that it will not bring up unanticipated side effect(s); if backware compatible is also to be covered, the problem could grow exponentially in no time.

Oh, I used an old Dell P4 2.8GHz/512MB BIOS A02 machine in the test. Boothing the Ghost 2003 either via 1.44MB Floppy or an HP 2G USB Flash Drive. The USB 2.0/SATA-PATA deviced used in the test are too much to be described. Amid the junks, there are only two 1TB HDD: one is Hitachi the other is a Seagate.

I can live with Ghost 2003's <1TB limitation. Since I have never tried to installed multiple OS' to my computer, I always remind myself to resist the temptation to put any HDD larger than 100G into the desktop as my booting HDD. Therefore, ghosting an image of 20 ~ 40 GB is about the regular backup job for my daily use. A 500GB HDD shall be enough to keep at least 10 different copies System Images for me --- my only concern is that very soon I might not be able to find any HDD less than 1TB on the market.

Given the fact that the eSATA port is getting very popular now (eSATA is N/A on any of my machines though. As an IC design engineer, I my self have not bough any Mother Board ever since my 2003 MSI Intel Celeron? 2.4GHz from local Fry's; I just "inherited" the computers from my relatives, friend who wanted to trash their machines.) I wonder is it possible and practical that people not only boot up the computer with an eSATA HDD, but also install all the applications and save the data on the same eSATA HDD? (just totally give up the idea of any Internal HDD?)

If that's practical, then the 1-OS-per-1-eSATA-HDD or 1-USER-per-1-eSATA-HDD sounds like very attractive idea to me. It can reduce a lot of conflictions between co-users of the same desktop PC resulted from lousy cleaning job or relentless download addiction... and etc. Slate/Tablet computer can also rely on this approach to make it a more practical device to people like me.