Hello, its good to see that there are still friendly forums out there. Anyway, so I used to have NG 2003 when all you had to do was burn a DVD with the .gho file and make it bootable. Very easy, quite fast. (I even made a bootable with a copy of HL:2 on it.) But then I got a new computer and sold my old one, the bootables I had didn't work at all with my hardware; NG 2003 just froze during boot process. So when NG 14 came around, I expected the same easy interface, medium-to-advanced options etc. But to my dismay, this was not the case at all. I find the interface clunky and the advanced view should always be the first screen you see, even on first run.

I heard people saying that NG 12 is the same as 14 but I wanted the newest version.

The system rescue disc failed to boot on both my laptop and desktop. I had to create a custom SRD for my desktop, so I am guessing that will be the same for the laptop. Something I didn't like was when I already had a recovery point (One-Time Backup) I couldn't restore my PC because the SRD wouldn't load. If I just assumed that I was protected with the SRD wouldn't I have to find identical hardware to create a custom one, or completely reinstall Windows, or dual-boot to be able to write to the other OS? I know I'm being stupid here, but shouldn't the point of an SRD be that it actually boots in an emergency? Anyway, I set-up my OS, defragged, RegistryFix, bla, bla, got rid of my page file used Standard compression and made an image!

Now, when the SRD loads I always get an error message, as follows.

-SreShell.exe - Application Error
-The instruction at 0x73cf4af2 referenced memory at 0x00000058.
-The memory could not be read.
-Click on OK to terminate the program.

Ok, whatever, so I just drag this out of the way and the SRD program works fine. If I click OK SRD closes. I have 2GB dual-channel PC-5300 DIMMs. (Don't you all think its funny when the Vista load screen appears? Well, if you still have XP?)

When the SRD, and NG itself, actually works its quite amazing. The performance is second to none, and I think the recovery options available at boot are very useful, bearing in mind that my last Ghost experience was 2003! My image file is 929MB on a 2GB stick, it actually takes longer to verify the file than to throw it back on my hard drive. Around 3 minutes and my PC is fixed from whatever situation/state. I love Ghost. (When it works - otherwise we are fatal enemies.)

When I made my boot image, I had Ghost installed on an external drive so that my recovery point contained only the operating system and no trace of Ghost. Ha ha.

Specs.
Desktop
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750
Asus P5B-e Plus
2GB 667MHz (2 x 1GB)
250GB Seagate Barracuda x 3
nVidia 8800GTS 320MB

I know that Ghost 2003 should have worked using this computer because I made new images from my new hard drives not just old images. I read somewhere on this forum that .gho files would just fill any extra space on a HDD with just blank formatted data, so old and new images should have worked. Thanks for listening.

In an effort to prevent long threads such as these from generating large file sizes (which seem be problematic for the server, at least at our OLD server), I have started a NEW thread (of the same name) here:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1205071186 (Norton Ghost 14 - continued)

What happens when you turn the "Full VSS Backup" switch on?