I am trying to make an image of my 'C' drive which is too large to fit on one DVD, it needs 2. The first DVD goes fine. then it asks for the second media, put that in tray, close it and although the graphics suggest that the burning is continuing, in fact nothing happens.

I am on XP SP2, a PC that is less than a year old, with 1GB memory.

I have tried formating the disks, but that is useless. I've erased tyhe disks after formating and does not improve the situation. I have altered the drive letter of the DVD drive from its normal 'Z' to 'L' to no avail.

I just don't know what else to try. Perhaps this is normal!!??

Hi Ancient_Learner,

Just a few questions. How large is your HD, how much data on your C: drive, any other partitions on the HD, how did you format the discs and are the discs + or - ?

Sorry, the DVDs are +. DVD +R and DVD+RW makes noo difference to my problem. I've tried both.

I echo Brian's recommendation.  Directly burning a Ghost 9.0 image to a DVD disc is - in my experience - painfully slow.  It is much more advantageous to store the image on a hard disk drive - splitting the image into DVD-sized files - and then burning those files to DVD discs.  Brian's estimate of a ten-fold difference in speed is not an exaggeration.

I've tried this Rad. A 3 GB partition with 1.5 GB data. Image size is 0.8 GB. It's a WinXP (barebone) partition.

Using Ghost 9, to image and verify, writing to the HD,  takes 1 minute. Writing to DVD takes 3 minutes and another 7 minutes to verify. ie 10 mins total. (Using a 4X DVD+RW)

I have restored the partition from that actual DVD.

Burning this 0.8 GB image from the HD to the same 4X DVD disc with Nero took 2:45 min. Just now I restored the partition from the image on the DVD put there by Nero. Verify process took 8 minutes, write took 1 minute. Total time 9 minutes.

It takes 1 minute to restore that partition from an image on the HD.

Interesting figures. DVD is slower.

Dell 8400 2 SATA HD's, non RAID

I can't answer your questions on verify/write. Out of my league.

I appreciate the effort & the details.

Verify supposedly goes thru all the steps of restoring the image with the exception of actually writing data to disk. Maybe someone can confirm this.

10 seconds to verify 800-MB, let's see, that would be reading at around 4800-MB/minute (6X800). Or 4.8-gigs per minute.

Do you happen to know off-hand what read-speed your DVD is rated for?

I could probably crunch out the numbers, but it's late and my brain is tired.

I also wonder if anyone else is seeing verify speeds 1/6th that of write speeds. Like I said, they are usually similar.

Seems odd that here your verify speeds are 1/6th that of write speeds, but on the other they are over double the time. No consistency.

Thanks Brian and Rad. I can burn 1DVD with Ghost perfectly alright, and I do not have an issue with that. It is when my drive needs more than 1 DVD that I am thawted.

And Rad's query  - - And will he be able to use these DVDs to RESTORE the image? or will he get an error saying "Not a Ghost image"? 

Or will he have to first transfer the images back to the hard disk before he can restore them?

Has anyone who has used this method actually restored images from the Nero-burned discs? - -Seems very relevent to me. It is no use if it doesn't in fact work.

It seems to me, that I might be as well to do without the  incremental backups provided by Ghost 9 and revert back to the previous edition of Ghost (2003), and be certain I can use multiple DVDs. Or go out and buy Acrinis that I am told doesn't have all the quirks of Norton. Annoying when I've paid good money for System Works Premier 2005, and not only am I gfoing to have to ditch their AntiVirus, but now the Ghost as well. The GoBack is a bad joke, I couldn't ever get that to even work at all even from the 2003 edition or the 2005.