orissacube

Ah....excellent reporting of the details of your setup!

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Looks like, in the process of gathering and reporting the details of your system, you may have stumbled upon the *answer* to your own question!

I don't know the inner workings of Ghost, so I can't say for sure how much *free space* Ghost wants or needs before it considers the size of a partition adequate to hold the data that is being restored.  But, if there is only 40 MB of free space vs the amount of data to be restored--that could likely be the problem!

What is the size reported by Ghost for that 1:1 partition that is greyed out?

And, what is the size of the data reported by Ghost contained in the image file for the partition you are trying to restore?

Curiosity question--with only 40 MB of free space--wasn't WinXP complaining about lack of free space?

So, assuming it is a *free space* issue--what to do?

Well, I would pop my DOS boot disc in that has DOS PartitionMagic on it.  Do some re-sizing to increase the size of the 1:1 partition (I wouldn't want to do partition resizing unless I had a *good* (Integrity check passes) Ghost iamge of the whole drive #1 first!).  And then see if Ghost was okay with restoring that 1:1 partition to the HDD #1.

But, if you don't have PartitionMagic, you might be able to find other partitioning tools (free?) on the internet that can resize partitions non-destructively (i.e. the data is not destroyed by partitioning)--but, I have no experience with any of those.

Or, you could use Ghost to resize your HDD!  Here's how:

Do you have enough room on the drive #2 to hold a Ghost image of the whole #1 drive?  You would choose *Local > Disk > To Image*.  If *yes*, then make an image of the whole drive #1.  (Good to have a whole drive backup anyway if you might be doing other partitioning with other tools later.)

Now, do a restore of that image:  *Local > Disk > From Image*.  When you do a *whole disk* restore, you will get a confirmation screen after you have selected the drive #1 as the destination drive that shows the partition layout of the destination drive.  You can, on that confirmations screen, select the different partitions and change their sizes.  You probably need to *shrink* the size of at least one partition to create enough *free space* to add to the 1:1 partition to make it bigger.  Now restore that image to the *resized* destination drive.

Once you have created a bigger 1:1, now return to Ghost and select your March, 2010 image file and see if you now have the option to restore it to the 1:1 partition (i.e. it's no  longer greyed out!).

Let us know what you decide and how it turns out!  Other questions?

orissacube

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May be the problem--but not likely!

I looked at your post about the system more closely and finally focus on this:

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Ghost is saying that the primary partition size is 15.829 GB in size, and the data stored in the image is 14.643 in size--so that's over 1 GB smaller than the partition size!  That should not be a problem for Ghost to restore to!  So, it's unclear why Ghost is refusing to restore an image file stored on the 2nd HDD, but is okay with an image stored on the optical DVD!!!

Your plan is not a *bad* one, but I'm not sure it addresses the *actual* problem--given what I have mentioned above.  But, it's worth a try.  Let us know how it turns out!

When doing the direct drive to drive clone, when you select the new, larger HDD as the target destination, you will get that confirmation screen like I mentioned above where you can change the size of the partitions before Ghost proceeds with the cloning.

I would recommend you put the new, larger HDD on the connector that the current OS drive #1 is connected to, and then connect that OS drive #1 to the connector that the other backup drive #2 was connected to (i.e. remove that drive #2 and set it aside for now).  Then do the cloning--you should see the size differences shown in the Ghost interface so you know which is the *source* and which is the *destination*.

orissacube

Let us know how your testing come out.