Hi Guys,

I've found your site whilst trying to resolve an error that has now suddenly started to appear after many successful 'Ghosting’s' & I'm hoping someone can give me advice...

Specs of the (old!) pc:
- Celeron 2.4GHz processor
- 256Mb DDR PC2700
- Primary Drive: Maxtor 160Gb drive
- Secondary Drive: Maxtor 120Gb drive
- Windows 2000 Pro

I only use it to take backup ghost images of the different computers in our office & nothing else gets loaded onto it.

I have been ghosting the hard disks every few mths using the same method for the last 18mths.  My usual procedure is to ghost the file, verify it & then boot into W2k & explore the image through Ghost Explorer, up until now this has always worked fine.

Now I've tried 3 different drives & the error happens on all three, despite each drive ghosting ok & verifying the file ok, when I go to Ghost Explorer it says ‘not a ghost image file’ but I can see that all the files are ghost files in Windows Explorer.

Can anyone help?  Thanks in advance,

Jtk

Hmm. This reminds me of a case I deal with a few months ago on the Symantec forums.

A current build of Explorer from GSS2 was able to read the image in that case though, so its worth a crack. My memory is that the cause of Cindy's case was an overzealous validity check (the image was valid, but it had something that tripped the check) that was taken out of Explorer in Ghost 8.

The Ghost Explorer from the GSS2 trialware will do to start, if you give that a try and it can read the image then you should be set. If not, we can dig deeper.


To look deeper we'd need to have a look at the first section of the first span (i.e., the .GHO file). The first 2560 bytes (0xA00 in hex) of the file are the critical part, which contain the root description structure which is probably what Explorer doesn't like.

There's a small VBScript at http://nigel.bree.googlepages.com/hex.txt and if you save it as a .vbs file it'll dump the relevant part of an image file out into notepad. I've got a tool here that can decode it back and we can take a look at it here in Ghost HQ.