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Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives (Read 57656 times)
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Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Mar 29th, 2010 at 10:20am
 
So has it been confirmed that Ghost 2003 will not work with these large hard drives? This topic was discussed in the recent eSATA thread (http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1266913744) but I was wondering if any definitive conclusions had been reached. Recently I was helping a friend back up his system to a new NTFS-formatted 1TB external USB HD. While I had difficulties getting various DOS USB drivers to recognize the 1TB drive, once I was able to do so Ghost 2003 had no problems creating and writing an image to the drive.

Web searches show that problems seem to be encountered with Ghost 2003 and hard drives in the 1TB and larger range, with "divide overflow" errors commonly mentioned. This is very similar to problems various utility programs (such as DOS FDISK and FORMAT, Norton Disk Doctor, etc.) have with large HDs of various sizes that apparently exceed the maximum number of clusters the programs were designed to handle. Usually this is a "hard limit" (i.e., creating smaller partitions does not eliminate the problem once the program reaches the maximum clusters it can handle) but I'm curious whether this is the case with Ghost 2003. Unfortunately I don't have a hard drive of this size to experiment around with but it would be very useful information especially with today's increasingly large hard drives.

EDIT: Okay I somehow missed the reference to this thread (http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1254343374) which provides a great deal more technical information about the topic but it still would be very helpful to have more definitive details and conclusions.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #1 - Mar 30th, 2010 at 11:03am
 
I restored images of two 500GB drives to a 1TB drive using Ghost 2003 with no problems, and switching from 1.5TB drive that Ghost failed to 1 TB drove that Ghost succeeded in your second link indicates to me 1TB is the limit.  That combined with info in your first link where Ghost again failed with a 1.5TB drive seems to indicate up 1TB is no problem, and problems arise when 1TB is exceeded.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #2 - Mar 30th, 2010 at 1:00pm
 
Thanks for your reply, Tator. Yes, Dan Goodell makes a very strong compelling case in the second referenced thread that Ghost 2003 internally uses a 41-bit signed integer value which translates to a maximum HDD size limit of 1 TiB (1.0995 TB). I'm still curious whether this is a "hard" HDD size limit or a partition size limit. I suspect it's the former (i.e., repartitioning a >1 TiB HDD into smaller partitions will not prevent errors once Ghost 2003 crosses the 1 TiB absolute limit in whatever partition it happens to be in). It would be nice to get confirmation whether that is or is not the case.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #3 - Apr 1st, 2010 at 9:04am
 
In reply #11 of your first link it states Ghost gave the divide overflow error with the 500GB partition after partitioning the 1.5TB drive which seems to confirm it's total drive size limit and not partition size.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #4 - Apr 1st, 2011 at 3:55pm
 
Wow, exactly a year after, this one will come back to life!

I am using a Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB, and also a Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 2TB as images storage. Both of them partitioned as 2 1TB partitions. Ghost is able to backup and restore to any of those partitions, so the 1.09 TB limit is as partition.

Edit: I always partition my drives with only ONE primary partition, and the as a logical drive in a extended partition.


Alex
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #5 - Apr 3rd, 2011 at 12:38am
 
Ghost 2003? The DOS version?
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #6 - Apr 5th, 2011 at 2:50pm
 
I'm quite surprised if Ghost 2003 is able to access 1+ TB HDDs. All the data I've seen says it won't, as mentioned earlier in this thread. Also, just for the record, I was mistaken.. the 1.0 TB external USB HDD was formatted FAT32, not NTFS.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #7 - Apr 6th, 2011 at 10:34pm
 
using ghost 2003 booted from floppy, i have tried to use 2 different 1.5 t hard drives.

no go

the 1.5 t hard drives were formatted with win xp. 

each single partitiom.



 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #8 - Apr 7th, 2011 at 11:25am
 
That continues to confirm my observations that 1.0 TiB is the max HDD size limit for Ghost 2003. I strongly suspect Alex-Ruiz is using a newer version of Ghost.

What type of error(s) did you experience? And how are the drives formatted (FAT32 or NTFS)?
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #9 - Apr 9th, 2011 at 11:41pm
 
i wish now that i wrote it down, but i encountered problems like ghost 2003 booted from floppy would not recognize the 1.5 drive.

best regards
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #10 - Apr 9th, 2011 at 11:43pm
 
it was both disk to disk no go and trying to use ghost 2003 to put an image of another hard drive on the 1.5 gig drives.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #11 - Apr 12th, 2011 at 9:57pm
 
Typically, you encounter "divide overflow" errors. I was just curious whether that was your experience.

With the previously mentioned 1.0 TB external USB HDD, I encountered "divide overflow" errors both with DOS USB drivers and the main Ghost 2003 program itself. Only one specific DOS USB driver combination was able to successfully access the HDD. I have no idea why and how that is the case.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #12 - Apr 15th, 2011 at 3:37pm
 
I have a WD 1.5TB drive that I've been trying to get to work with Ghost 2003 (DOS) via USB.  When I had a single partition of 1.5TB, Ghost would not recognize the drive and allow me to do anything.  I repartitioned the 1.5TB drive to have a 1TB partition on it and recopied the GHO images to it.  After doing this, I hooked the drive back up via USB and Ghost now lets me use the drive.  It appears to run very, very, very slow though so, there still maybe other issues but right now, it is copying from the 1.5TB drive with a 1TB partition.  Hope this helps.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #13 - Apr 16th, 2011 at 12:15pm
 
Thanks Malik. Again, I'm quite surprised you were able to access that 1.5 TB HDD before and after repartitioning. Did you use the native Iomega USB drivers (ASPIEHCI.SYS for USB 2.0)? That driver gave a "divide overflow" error with the 1.0 TB HDD I tested.

And upon more careful reading of the second thread I previously referenced (http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1254343374), the OP was unable to detect the 1.5 TB HDD directly connected to the SATA controller on his system and not via a USB interface. It wouldn't show as an available destination drive but did show as a source drive for some reason. The OP was apparently able to make a successful image of the 1.5 TB HDD as a source drive, and did not encounter any "divide overflow" errors which have been associated with USB HDDs so far in my experience. The issue was never resolved either.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 and 1+TB hard drives
Reply #14 - Aug 2nd, 2011 at 12:45pm
 
An update with some more data...

I recently acquired a WD Passport 1 TB external USB HDD. The drive was formatted NTFS from the factory and contained various utility software and tools that I didn't want. I had no problems accessing it with Ghost 2003 using the Panasonic DOS USB driver and DI1000DD.SYS, and successfully made a full disk image of the drive before repartitioning and formatting it in FAT32 (I decided to create one FAT32 partition for the entire 1 TB free space).

Subsequently however, I've discovered that I can no longer access the drive with DI1000DD.SYS, getting the usual "divide overflow" errors in Ghost 2003. Only ASPIDISK.SYS allows me to access the drive in Ghost 2003, but it doesn't show up in the list of mounted disks so I cannot make any disk or partition images from the drive. It does show as a destination drive in the File Explorer window so I can save images of other drives to it. This is the same quirky behavior I previously experienced with my friend's Verbatim 1 TB FAT32-formatted USB HDD that I've discussed in other threads. I'm pretty sure it's due to ASPIDISK.SYS mounting the drive as SCSI (or something similar) even though it's not.

So, apparently the FAT32 file system is the limiting factor for the maximum HDD size that Ghost 2003 can handle, as NTFS allows 1 TB drives to be successfully accessed (at least from my single data point of experience). It would be interesting to hear other experiences with greater than 1 TB NTFS-formatted HDDs.

Also, I cannot figure out any way to restore the full disk image I made (if I ever wanted to revert to the factory configuration) since I can no longer access the HDD in Ghost 2003 (in the list of mounted disks for image creation/restoration). I suppose later versions of Ghost would still be able to handle the .GHO image format but I don't really want to purchase yet another Ghost product just for that purpose.

UPDATE: It appears that the latest version of Ghost (15.0) does not support restoring from .GHO images. I'm not familiar at all with the newer versions of Ghost but it looks like I'm screwed.
 
 
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