I found this board and planned to use the information to learn about Ghost.  Didn't get that far.  I installed Ghost 12.  It downloaded updates and hung.  I rebooted and made a backup.  It seemed to work.  When I tried to shut off the machine it would not shut down.  Wound up truning off the power.  Rebooted, did not want to boot.  Even hung in the BIOS checks.  Tried a few times, got to windows.  Pretty much all of my normal pgms were missing.  Shut down, needed power switch.  After a few iterations it would not boot at all.  Looking at a system log later it was actually generating I/O errors on the target drive (drive is fine).  I eventually restored with Retrospect.  That did not go as advertised but I did recover.

I suspect I have just provided nothing definitive.  Just hoping someone might have an idea.  I am a bit reluctant to try again.

I have no idea why things failed in the BIOS.  It did not make sense.  There may be something intermittant in the drive (it is a new SATA) or motherboard.  When the system would hang the access light on that drive would remain on.  The drive has been happy for about a month now, and seems fine after eliminating Ghost.  I have run chkdsk on it when I installed it and again after this happened.  It is an empty 500 GB drive so that is a fair amount of I/O.

When things are running fine, you install new software, it hangs on install, and then the machine is pretty much trashed, you get suspicious of the coincidence.  When the problem goes away if you remove the new software, it kind of stretches the imagination.  Possibly Ghost did not do it.

It kept getting worse and worse until I could not boot at all.  I installed a new copy of XP, installed Retrospect, and restored from the Retrospect backup I made before attempting to install Ghost.  Over the years I have been bitten more than once so my paranoia is well developed.  Not a single problem once the system was restored to pre-Ghost.

If it was a drive problem it should not have caused Ghost to hang at the end of live update.  Whole different controller on all the other drives.

Perhaps that update was a new release and may have problems.  Anyone know?

I am not really expecting a immediate solution.  Just hoping someone else had a similar expereince and got over it.  I really don't want to go through that whole thing again to see if it works a second time.

Thanks for the info Brian.  I recently changed out the memory sticks and just recently ran memtest for about a day.  Might try that again.

I have been copying the backup files from Ghost around the drive for most of the day.  Probably in the range of 400 GB of I/O.  No problems.

None of this is definitive.  Intermittent only occurs now and then.

the only setting in Bios that I can think related to SATA drives is:
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useful information regarding ghost.exe(7,7.5,8)and SATA drives and new Mother boards :

useful info:
There are several modes available in the BIOS Setup for defining the motherboard behavior with regard to S-ATA and P-ATA devices. Which options are available depends on the motherboard, but the following options will always be there:

* Native, or Enhanced
* Legacy, or Combined
* Auto or Mixed

On some mainboards it is even possible to disable S-ATA altogether. If that option is chosen, the motherboard will work like it has no S-ATA at all.

On Packard Bell systems the Legacy mode is used by default. The main reason for this is the way the software is installed during production or during system restoration with the Master CD or DVD. During this process, Ghost (version 7.5) under DOS is used. This software is not yet able to cope with S-ATA in Native mode.

which one can conclude that you can still use old ghost.exe(7,7.5,8) in DOS with new hardware Motherboard SATA hard disks if the setting in the Bios is set to LEGACY MODE ??
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check Bios for these settings  nothing to loose
Regards Ben