All good questions, Radministrator.

I am not aware of any mechanism to update the Recovery Environment Disk CD, nor to create a bootable diskette for that purpose.  The latter would appear to be technically unfeasible, given that the restore function is operating in Windows PE and a diskette can only hold 1.44MB of content.

I have no ‘inside knowledge’ of Symantec’s thinking on this subject, but I suspect that:

• Symantec believes that the restore phase of the imaging process (contained on the Recovery Environment Disk CD) is very stable.  LiveUpdate does update the creation phase of the imaging process (i.e., the Ghost 9.0 executable), however – and, intuitively, it would seem that is where the complexity exists.

• Symantec would issue some form of a customer alert and action plan if it was discovered that a fatal defect existed in the Recovery Environment Disk CD.

Personally, I would prefer a Recovery Environment that is updated via LiveUpdate, but such is not the situation.  At least the Recovery Environment is updated annually with each new release of Ghost (and the core program is updated as needed via LiveUpdate).

In contrast, is it not the case that all updates for Ghost 2003 ceased long ago?  While theoretically Ghost 2003 could be updated, as a matter of practicality, is it not the case that no patches are being developed and deployed?