I have a dos disk of ghost 7, ~ 630kbytes, which I imaged a Windows 2000 system into spanned high compression images. Ie imaged an NTFS OS partition into an empty NTFS partition using the dos bootable ghost 7.

I then burned the spanned images (2 GB *.gho + 0.8 GB *.ghs) onto a DVD disc. Ghost seven only burns onto CD's.

Today I tried to restore those images from DVD and of course I hit problems.

i) Ghost 7 cannot read nor restore from DVD's.
ii) A Ghost 11 I managed to borrow (boots from some Live CD) would not recognise the Ghost 7 images on the DVD as being a Ghost image!  I presume this has something to do with Ghost's chequered past and it's various purchases by Symantec etc?
iii) I found a utility to copy the images from the DVD onto the new NTFS partitions I just made and formatted. But this time Ghost 7 (dos boot) wont even see the NTFS partitions, let alone read them or acknowledge their existence.

Question: Is there any other package/utility that can: a) read either NTFS or DVD media, AND b) restore highly compressed images made by Ghost 7, dos? If not, any suggestions/alternatives to restoring from these images?

Thank you.

Satyr
P.s. Hi btw. I'm new, and this board is a good idea

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Thanks Rama! I didn't think of that.

Since I posted that message I persisted. Using Volkov commander I was able to get Ghost 11 to read and restore this time. I now have my win2k back

Next challenge is to recover my slave drives lost partition. It's a 250 GB WD with 120+ GB of data. I didn't have the media to back it up, and now my old server motherboard only sees the drive as a 33 GB drive. A freeware utility called "testdisk" see's the partition, but I'm at a bit of a loss on how to apply the Dynamic Drive Overlay onto the primary master disk's mbr, without affecting the win2k's boot. But I guess this ain't the place for HDD partition recovery matters. I have posted the query at WD & Microsoft forums.

Thanks again.

Glad to see the guys got help for you. Just as a general thing, the code in Ghost 11 still has all the old backwards-compatibility for older .GHO images back to at least version 3 (and possibly version 1, although it's hard to be completely certain). Compatibility back the other way isn't guaranteed - Ghost 11, for instance, contains extensions to the image format for the support of Ghost Explorer's NTFS image editing that Ghost 8.x can't necessarily restore - but we have never abandoned restore support for older image formats, period.

satyr wrote on Mar 27^th, 2007 at 3:09pm:

Out of curiosity though, I'm a little perplexed by this. There's nothing at all chequered about our history, and there are no "various purchases", just one - Binary Research, created by Murray, to Symantec in 1998, and all the developers came over. In the main, we were left completely alone in Auckland to keep doing our thing (Joe Wang who came from 20/20 and was our VP for awhile certainly was hands-on, but really all he did was drive us hard to integrate 20/20's AutoInstall into our pieces).

We're all aware of Symantec's generally poor reputation for support, but I've seen the "Symantec ruins products" meme in respect to Ghost a few places and the simple fact is that everything we did, the original developers did trying to stay faithful to the original vision of the product. Now, we're only human, but I wouldn't blame some mythical corporate entity for anything we did voluntarily.

NightOwl wrote on Mar 27^th, 2007 at 10:45pm:

Ghost 7 Dos disk does not have the DVD drivers. It has CD drivers but not DVD, therefore cannot read the media. Ghost11 does, but didn't recognise the Ghost 11 burns for the very reason you state below;

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What worked was what I stated 15 minutes before your above reply, loading third party DOS CD/DVD drivers.

nbree, thank you for your reply. My comment about Ghost's chequered past is based on the non-forum version of this site, where I recall a statement that Symantec purchased both Ghost and another imaging company, and called both products Ghost. I don't know to what extent there was functional/code merging that went on afterwards, but I much preferred the DOS version than the *hot imaging*. The *hot imaging* seems to be competing with other live back-up software and all, but I'd love to see the parent company, Symantec, release a simple DOS version of Ghost, because most of my colleagues and with my clients I have been using only the DOS version. Until the last couple of years where the DOS version 4, 5, even 7, no longer kept up with all partition formats, nor disk sizes (reads disk details off BIOS) rather than thru IDE/SCSI ports. BIOS is not always accurate. In particular when the HDD is an upgrade on motherboards without 48biglba etc.

But I'd still prefer a DOS version for several reasons:
a) Easy recovery when partition/OS no longer boots, hot version wont do that,
b) Doesn't take up space or live resources like the *hot imaging* version.
c) Don't want to spend full amount for hot version when only the DOS version is desired,
d) Extracting a fully functioning DOS version from Ghost 11 is not straight forward.

Thanks for your responses.

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Can you elaborate?

Rama