I have been using Ghost for years; version 15 on Vista.  Usually do three independent full restore points per week as it is used for a home business as well as other things.  For the last couple of months it has started ignoring the flag for limiting to three points and doesn't delete the oldest, just keeps going till it runs out of disk space.

Now the biggest problem - Ghost recently has started refusing to finish, stopping at the validation point near 75%, and just shows the time to finish getting longer and longer.  For reference I check verify recovery point. 

If I choose cancel the operation, it takes quite a while and while getting impatient waiting for it to cancel and rebooting, the recovery point is there, at least enough of it to use the browser and read some of the files.  I don't know if it complete or not.

I tried reinstalling Ghost, removing some recent software, and system restore, but nothing has solved the issue.

I tried yesterday running a full recovery point without validation - runs fine.  Trying to validate after the fact just hangs.  I close the dialog box, which showed no progress, and it says the point is valid, but computer had to be restarted before the recovery point browser would work correctly.

Update:  I now believe, based on other system issues that I have a corrupt system which is causing Ghost to hang and not validate the recovery point.

Lesson learned - If you do frequent recovery points, take a know good one and save it elsewhere so if all recent ones are also corrupt, at least you don't have to load operating system and programs from the beginning.

lwolff123

lwolff123 wrote on Jan 7^th, 2013 at 9:58am:

How old is your computer hardware?

If it's 5 years or more, you might want to consider possible power capacitor problems on the motherboard.  I have personally had two systems die from *bad caps*--they were on systems built in 2002 and 2003--and approximately 6-7 years later the capacitors started bulging and leaking their internal chemicals.  (See here for more information on bad capacitors:  Badcaps.net , and  How to Identify Bad Capacitors )

The problems when that started happening were subtle and variable.  I started getting blue screens of death, random system re-boots, crashing programs, and corruption of certain software.  It was hard to be sure what was causing the problem--RAM, power supply, failing HDDs, failing HDD controllers, failing CPU, etc.

And, in some instances, it was only certain software that was accessing certain hardware that would bring on the problem--so it seemed to be a software issue.  But, looking back, it must have been that certain software put strain on certain parts of the system that taxed the power capacitors more than other software--it was still a hardware problem that was triggered by the software!

Corruption of my OS was the ultimate end point!

lwolff123 wrote on Jan 9^th, 2013 at 5:41pm:

When I had one of my systems die most recently from bad caps--I had to go back almost 5 months to get to a Ghost image that did not have corrupted software, and OS registry problems, before I had a restored system that functioned correctly!

lwolff123

Are you on top of installing Win7 without creating a SRP?

lwolff123

lwolff123 wrote on Jan 10^th, 2013 at 3:44pm:

Just for the record, HDD disk errors would be considered *hardware*!

When my power capacitors had become bad enough, my OS became corrupted.  I did a fresh install of WinXP that succeeded without errors (don't ask me why or how).  But, when I tried to download and install the Windows updates, multiple files would not correctly load and run.

Let us know how things go!

lwolff123

lwolff123 wrote on Jan 15^th, 2013 at 10:07am:

Interesting--I was not aware of that behavior during Win7 installation! 

So, there was no indication during the install routine that the installation program found two different HDDs, and that it was going to create the reserved partition on the second HDD and install Win7's program files on the first HDD?

I assume that if you disconnected that second HDD with the reserved partition that Win7 would no longer boot--because the boot files were located on that second HDD's reserve partition--correct?

lwolff123 wrote on Jan 15^th, 2013 at 10:07am:

Well, that certainly suggests that something is amiss on the first system!  Have you looked at the condition of the large capacitors in the area of the CPU to see if any of them are bulging on top, tipped to one side, or have brown crud on the top and/or bottoms?

If you install Win7 into a partition (which is not Active) on HD0 a SRP will be created elsewhere. Is it possible your intended partition for Win7 wasn't set Active prior to the install?

If you install Win7 into an Active partition on HD1 a SRP will be created in unallocated space on HD0. To avoid a SRP you must install Win7 into an Active partition on HD0.