anythingbutaone,

It sounds like a drive letter issue.

Could you tell us how you copied with Ghost? Did you restore an image to the new HD? Did you use Copy My Hard Drive? Did you partition the new HD prior to using Ghost? Which Ghost?

Laptop or desktop? Did you use an external HD enclosure?

Hi Brian

sorry, i should have put more details in the query

This was a new internal preformatted HDD for a Desktop.  The current version of Ghost i am using is Ghost 12.   and i used the Copy my Hard drive feature in the tools option.

That said i read your solution, downloaded a copy of a win98 bootdisk (i don't have a windows 98 machine).  Booted from the disk,  ran "fdisk /mbr" rebooted again and hey presto, my desktop with my new HDD 

now i'm a happy chappy

Thankyou
Anythingbutaone

Gentlemen,
Will these solutions work when the HDD is copied but when it boots up it doesn't show the user names? I copied to a larger drive and it said it was successful but when I fired it up it never gave me the user names. I've got Ghost 10, Win XP Pro. and the destination drive was mounted and ready to go as Drive F: (I've got a CD drive and DVD drive installed).

Yes, I  meant the welcome screen with the user names, only in my case there were no user names displayed. The destination drive was formatted and connected as a slave drive. It had a drive letter assigned to it by windows. It only had one partition as far as I can tell.

I had good and bad results. I was able to download a basic Win98 Boot diskette, but when I used fdisk, it choked on the NTFS file structure, so that didn't work. In fact it did something so I couldn't read the  drive so I couldn't use the CD file that was suggested either. I booted from the Utilities CD that came with the drive and formatted the HDD. When I rebooted, the system didn't assign a letter to it because it was shown to be an unassigned partition. so far so good. I then ran Ghost 10 and was able to make a bootable image on the new HDD. The minor problem was that it was the same partition size as the original. The remaining space was made into another logical partition. I then saw where I could set it to use all the space. I went into the Disk Management section of XP and deleted the partition. I ran Ghost again checking to box to use the whole drive and it made a copy using all the scapce. But when I booted off the copy I'd get a disc read error usually after the Norton GoBack sequence. After fighting back and forth. I let it copy the same size. I'll see if I can use a Partition program to get all the disc space under one partition.

Pardon my ignorance, but this is my first series of attempts to copy my C:\ drive to an external hard drive for backup purposes. The instructions in the manual for Ghost 10 don't really explain how to do this; they refer to replacing an old drive with a new one.
When I have tried, more than once, to schedule Ghost 10 to copy to the blank drive overnight, it doesn't work and I don't know why not. The Symantec website is worse than useless; it's an exercise is circular logic. I am hoping that somewhere on your site you have simplified instruction for doing what I want to do-which is mirroring my system, then being able to perform incremental updates.
I have a HP Pentium 4 2.93 GHz system running WIN XP SP2 with a 200 GB hard drive and 2 GB of RAM. The C:\ drive, which is what I want to back up, is 89% free; and the SimpleTech ext drive is 160 GB, so space is not an issue.
I simply cannot understand how to follow these instructions and get the blasted thing to work! If it matters, Ghost 10 also came with the disk for Ghost 2003, as well as Save & Restore (which doesn't have a version #- but the print date on the manual is 3/06 whereas the date for Ghost 10 is 9/05).
Can someone please help me, in plain English, to understand how to use this program to backup my entire system on a regular basis?
I'm not a tech, but I'm moderately comfortable with managing my system. I've been computing for 14 years and this is my 4th PC; but my last one kept crashing on me and I wound up losing data even though I did regular backups to alternating zip disks (don't get me started on that topic...).
I am thanking you in advance for any help you can provide.

Afraid of Ghosts,

This will get you started. Let's do a simple recovery point first and move onto incrementals if the basic approach is easy.

Your C: drive contains about 20 GB of used space so the image should take around 20 minutes to create.

Start Ghost 10
click Back Up Now
click Define New Backup
In the Easy Setup Window put a dot in Define a new custom backup. OK
click Next in the Define Backup Wizard
select the drive to backup. ie your C: drive. Next
put dot in Independent recovery point. Next
choose the location for the backup image. ie your external HD. Next
Compression Standard. Tick verify. Untick Limit the number of ...
Ignore Advanced. Next
dot in Manually
tick Create Recovery point now
Finish

Let us know what happened.