hello Rad,

Last month I tried a Linux install, found there where still some issues with my hardware so sort of forgot about it, it made a few file systems/partitions on my drive, shrank the once I had to make room, all very nice.

Anyway, Monday I figured lets remove it all so I fixed the boot record the old fdisk way and booted fine, then in manager I delete the partitions, moment I did that my drive suddenly was 2000GB or so in manager...

I figured a reboot may fix it but made it only worse, windows would load splash screen and that was it, I used my partition magic floppy's .. had to install a floppy drive but it just gave errors which it could not fix, so norton ghost 9 time.....

now I always used previous version of ghost in dos but since 9 I was making a nice backup every 4-5 weeks in windows to an old PC with a few disks strung together to make enough room.

so in goes the cd and booting up only to find out it would not find my on-board lan card... uh ho... I could not remove the 2 drives from the old pc as they made 1 huge file system so I figured lets install basic windows so I have LAN and copy the v2i files to a small partition.

Well winxp install failed as it could not access the disk at all... ok so fdisk time, fdisk saw all the old partitions and some new once but deleting them was not an option as it where not DOS partition it said.

Searching the web I found sdisk which I downloaded, made boot disk, booted from disk, garbled screen, after some experimenting it was te ctmouse driver that would corrupted the screen output, dont ask me why, maybe gfx card issue, so found old dos mouse.exe and used that.

Well sdisk was great in showing me all of my drive info and problems but was demo, since it was for now my best call I bought it online, new disk, new boot, removed all partitons without problem ! yah

made new partition C 160 (was 150) D 90 (was 100) E 50 (was 50), installed win xp, installed LAN driver, installed ghost 9 and could access the other PC, I restored E and D under windows, went fine, then tried C and of course that would not work, no problem, copie the v2i files (13.4gb total) to E and use the cd-rom.

you are probably laughing now, anyways during those houres of waiting and ghost network problems I found your site again, hence my email now, hence its a selfish email

anyways local > partion > from disk ... umm no v2i files are not supported... no worry, close ghost and click the advanced section and click the restore there, yes np, point me to the v2i file... ok you want that on C ? 146GB.. sure... but C is not big enough (was 160) so delete a partition, okay, deleting D again, so now you have 160+90 for an original 146GB backup...

it started and bang error at the end about not being able to write something, was sure it had to do with the size so closed it and rebooted figuring a new xp install was needed but no, XP started without issue... so what ghost been doing in that drive for 15min ? oh well with sdisk came EASEUS partion manager and since Partiton Magic let me down a few hours before I used that to make C 250GB as one whole partition.

Back to ghost 9, select the v2i file and get same error about not big enough... ummm.. ok lets try something else... instead of restore drive I selected restore files, I ctrl+a all files once it shows the v2i list and I started the restore.... we talking 24GB or 13.4GB max compressed v2i files... total run time was 7 hours !!!!

anyways fingers crossed, reboot time... and low and behold I was back, so far only 2 issues, my recycle bin was corrupted but who cares and mbm 5 has issues with its IO driver, which I did find odd, but reinstall fixed that...

when your done laughing .... yes I should have read your pages years ago a lot better and know that v2i files are not ghost image files but what I don't understand is why partion backups (yes I make one for each partition) require a complete drive as restore, and I could not do that as I had the v2i files on there, I did try another drive but I was tired and since its all sata and I only had the old fasioned drives I could not get it to work, bios saw it but ghost did not.

now the big question... I want to prevent this in the future and I noticed on your page ghost 12 and USB drive so prefable I would like to do the following:

* get a USB drive
* be able to backup to there via windows or if that is no go then via a boot cd (with some form of script to make a history and not overwrite all files)
* be able to restore without issues so if I backup partion C then be able to restore it to a partition of the same size and not getting silly messages about to little room

will ghost 12 fit that bill or another program ?... not that windows made backup files are not useable in dos based ghost

Well that is about it, I hope this rant finds you well and I was pleasantly surprised that your site was still around

Regards, Alex

Alex,
Does it still say that? In the WinXP Recovery Console you always get a similar message before using fixmbr. When you use fixmbr and return to the Recovery Console, you get the same error message so the message is fallacious.