Brian,

If I recall correctly, I had to do FULL erases of CDRW's before using them with previous Ghost versions.  After prices of CDR's came down, I just started using CDR's.

I spent about 30 minutes with Symantec LiveChat.  This is where it ended up:
> Please note that we need to research the issue further.
John > ok
> Please provide me Belarc info and Msinfo. I shall e-mail. Please reply to the e-mail with the requested information.

I asked if there were any problems noted with Ghost.  No answer to that.  I doubt if Belarc with solve their issue.

I'll keep you posted.

For what it's worth, Ghost 10 does write to CD-RW on my computer. But not to DVD+RW (Imation brand).

Dirt,

DVD burning does work from Ghost 9 in my computer but not from Ghost 10. But as discussed elsewhere in this forum, it's much faster to image to your HD in 4480 MB (or less) splits and then burn to DVD with Nero (using UDF mode) etc.

I'm not familiar with RAID but most people image to a HD partition other than the OS partition. If there is only a single partition you can even write the OS image to the same partition (C drive). Burn the image and then delete the image from the C drive.

Because of its slow and unreliable nature in some computers, I'd avoid restoring from DVD's as well. Before the restore, transfer the image to another HD, if possible.


Quote:

That was my error message too. The Gear software formats your DVD as it writes the image. You just need to insert a blank disc. At least that's what is supposed to happen.

TDVD,

8 minutes is a long time but mine takes 4 to 5 minutes. All Preinstallation Environments are slow to load. I'm not sure, but some CD drives seem to work faster than others, although it's marginal. At least you have seen our alternatives which I think are better than writing to DVD directly.

Have you seen this thread to make sure it doesn't apply to you.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=11318...

Quote:

In 12 minutes i forgot to wrote.

I finally succeeded to backup and recover from spanned  DVD backup. I'll advice NOT to use it, the way it works it cannot be reliable.

1. I had to buy another DVD+RW  drive (my first, windows certified, drive was not on the list, but driver test said it was ok, not so);
2. I had to update GEAR drivers wich resulted in not working Ghost at all.
3. I had to reinstall Ghost and after solving a lot of problems with Live Update and protection (for what?).
4. Backup went quite well, 30 minutes for 10Gb on 2 DVd's.
5. Restoring it is a crime, you have to swap disks every 30 seconds about more than 20 times. They even warn you for that  BTW mounting for spanned drives is not supported (nice they document that).

I wonder what idiot approved selling the product with advertising the spanned DVD backup. I'm sure he or she didn't try it by him/her self.

TDVD, glad to hear you got it working.  Once the price of external USB drives came down, DVD backup is not a practical as you noted, unless your backup only uses 1 (or 2) DVD's because of the swaping.  But in an emergency, something is better than nothing.

With double-layer media prices falling, DVD backup could be more usable.  This same logic used to apply to backup tapes--once you got past one tape, restore was not pretty!

I'm not impressed with Symantec not openly acknowledging the problems with Ghost 10. External HD, DVD.

I almost went back to using Ghost 9 when Ghost 10 didn't do an incremental backup. But it was probably my fault as I had restored an image the previous day and I should have started a new backup set.