Hi All,

I performed a manual backup after some software updates a few hours ago and when I came back to the computer the screen was blanked (black) and the HD red light was on solidly. I had to push reset to get any response. On the reboot the computer passed the POST and then nothing happened except the HD red light stayed on. I tried to boot the recovery disk but all that happened is the computer passes the POST, the CD drive spins up and the HD red light stays on. It will boot "The Ultimate Boot CD For Windows" to the first boot screen but the only place I can get to from there is the utility that will wipe/format my HD. That's a pretty drastic step to take as, with this screw-up, I'm not confident that the newly made backup will actually work. I tried Symantic Customer Service (Ha!) and was told nicely that "my $100 for Ghost 10 doesn't count anymore as they're up to 14 --- would I like to buy a copy --- here's the link."

I went back and tried again. This time I let the CD boot process proceed even though there didn't seem to be much happening except the HD red light stays on. After about twenty minutes the CD started to boot. I thought my trouble was over. When I got to the recovery screen and looked for my just-made recovery point it wasn't visible. I selected the nearest recovery point (3 days ago!) which was supposed to have been made automatically every morning at 7:00am. It hadn't made one in three days!

Anyway, even that one would have been good enough except that now the HD red light goes out but Ghost thinks my external USB backup drive is my "C:" drive and it can't see the real "C:" drive and chokes at that point.

Can anyone out there shed some light on this? I'm posting this using my daughter's computer.

My setup is 2 year old home-brewed Intel P4  3Ghz with 2 gigs of memory running Windows XP SP2.

Thanks in advance.  

Thanks Brian.

I determined that the HD took a dump insofar as garbled boot sectors. No utility available to me could access the drive, even to format it. The only place the drive "existed" was in the BIOS... nowhere else.

I bit the bullet and ran down to the store for an new HD - 360 gigs for $105. WD Caviar. No big bargain but, as they say, "any port..."

Luckily, after doing a clean install off the original Windows XP disk, the Ghost CD booted into the recovery environment normally and the three-day old backup restored as it should have, except for one thing:

It wouldn't do an automatic restore and it made me do a manual restore by browsing for the restore file(s). Turns out that for some unknown reason, it was seeing my USB backup drive ("F:") after my DVD ("D:") and CD ("E:") drives as a "D:" drive. It took me a few minutes to figure out what the heck was going on but after I manually selected the three-day old backup set it went to work with it and in twenty-five minutes I was up and running normally again.

Now I suppose I'll have to go out and get a 320 Gig HD for backup as the 160 I've been using won't be sufficient for long for the new HD.

Next, after I send this, I'm going to shut down and connect the former drive as a slave to see if it can be formatted... or even "seen" at all.  Too bad, as it's just out of warrany. It's probably a "soft" as compared to "hard" issue with the drive but I'm not expert enough to paly with low-level formatting even if I had a tool to do it with.

Again, thanks for the reply.

Brian wrote on May 1^st, 2008 at 11:53pm:

Hi Brian,

Yes, you're right, I suppose that I could have restored off of my backup straight to the new drive but I wanted to make sure that my restore would have the "best" chance of working and I figured that with the original XP disk doing a format, partition and install on the new HD it would confirm for me that everything was was working ok and that I would be able to see and restore from the backup USB-HD when I got to that. As it turned out, I did have to browse for my restore files as the system had shuffled drive letters on me.

All I was doing by installing XP before trying to restore was, in my mind, providing the restore with a known to be working base "platform" of a clean XP install for the recovery to install over. I suppose that by doing this my recovery took an extra half-hour but for me it was worth it to guarantee that the revovery would succeed and that I wouldn't run into some unforseen snag.

Once I knew that the recovery had succeeded and that my machine was back to normal I hooked-up the former HD as a cable select slave and, low and behold, The BIOS and the rest of the system saw it but saw it as completely garbled. From "My Computer" I gave it a full (as compared to quick) format and that also worked. Next, I tested it by transfering and reading back a few files with no problems. I then copied the contents of the backup drive over to it for safekeeping and did a full format of the backup USB-HD to clean it up and give it a fresh start. After that was complete I told Ghost to make a brand new base backup of the C: drive on it. this morning I checked and Ghost had made it's daily incremental backup to it just like its supposed to.

I think what I'll do is leave this drive in the machine and have it there to manually make a monthly full backup on (until it runs out of space to keep up with my new, twice as big C: drive) as extra added insurance that I'll have a working spare backup in case the regular backup drive dies some day. I'll simply copy the contents of my backup drive (G:) to the former main, now spare, "F:" drive. Better to have a month-old backup in an emergency than no backup at all. Also, with Ghost compressing the backup, I probably won't exceed the 160 gig capacities each of the "spare" and regular backup drives until the C: drive being backed up (320 Gigs capacity) gets up to more than 250 gigs of data. Considering that I don't keep movies on it or do movie editing on my system, it could be years before 160 gigs would be insufficient for a compressed backup.

Yes, I know, plenty of folks have more data than that just in Mp3 files but that's not me. I think that, at age 64, my computing habits are unlikely to change significantly and right now I can't forsee ever even filling a 320 Gig drive with my correspondance, photos and scanned documents. BUT... ya just don't never know and some day I could be eating these words.  

Hi Brian,

So far - so good with the former C: drive, now an F: drive. It just sits there with a backup backup for a worst-case emergency. I'm finding that my load times are better with this new drive. Not by a lot but enough to notice.

About the XP install before a recovery attempt, I thought that on a recovery it would leave any file for which the backup didn't have a newer version alone and only overwrite files that were older or that weren't present at all, like my application files. I didn't know that the restore begins with a format and partition of the drive being restored. Thanks for that info as It will save some time if something like this ever happens again.

Regards,

David

Hi.

Sure, I'll report back in a while (weeks? months?) on the status of the former "C:" drive, now the "F:" drive.

Should something else go wrong with it I'll be sure to let you know immediately.

Regards,

David