Warning! Norton Ghost 10 Major Problems

[Formula99]

This message is to all Norton Ghost users or those thinking of buying or upgrading. In a word DON'T. I recently went from Ghost 9.0 to Ghost 10.0 and it is riddled with bugs and problems which has almost wrecked my system. Add to this the absolutely shockingly awful "support" from Symantec and I am left considering a conversation with my solicitor!

Specifically -

1. SATA drives are clearly a problem when in the recovery mode. Neither of my 2 Maxtor SATA drives appear in the recovery mode which is kinda important since that's where my recovery images are stored!

2. Even standard IDE drives also are a problem in Recovery mode. My bog standard 120GB IDE Maxtor is not displayed in this mode.

3. Software based RAID is NOT supported. I tested Ghost 10.0 on my backup PC which has an NVIDIA RAID built on the MB. I can't get the recovery mode to boot properly even when adding the NVIDIA to the boot process from a floppy drive.

Needless to say I have "tried" to get help from Symantec Support. I might as well have asked my cat for help. The first "technician" told me that I was using non supported drivers for my SATA drives which is absolute nonsence - all the drivers identified in Control panel for the Drives are present on the recovery disk. Oh and also, apparently, for certain IDE drives one has to load drivers for those in recovery mode since they are not supported. What a load of old b%^&*cks!

I then made the mistake of using logic to dismiss this diagnosis. "So why in Ghost 9.0 then do my exotic SATA and highly exotic IDE drive appear in recovery mode". Answer - "Ghost 10 has an improved native driver support than Ghost 9.0 which is why your drives are not appearing"

Ugghh???????? ???

Trying to contain my annoyance, I dully ran their partition complier and emailed to them. No response. Called them again and then spoke with another space cadet adamant that its my system. Sent the partition info AGAIN - no response.

So in summary, if you are one of those strange misfits like me who are clearly at the "very edge" of the latest drive hardware technology then DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES put Norton Ghost 10 on your system. On a positive note, I tried Acronis True Image v9.0 and ALL my drives show up quite happily in recovery mode without the need for floppy drive loads, incantations or whatever (even my highly exotic 120GB IDE drive - wow!). Also my NVIDIA RAID on my other PC works just fine with True Image v9.0.

Oh, on a final thought. Norton's Recovery disk is not upgraded - you get it with your retail pack or download the image if you buy softcopy of the web. The Acronis recovery disk on the other hand is created by the Installed Windows software which means that Acronis can add more support for new drives and you can create upgraded Recovery disks. A cynic might suggest that Symantec have deliberately chosen this configuration so that you have to upgrade in order to have the latest drive technology supported??? No surely not.

Well done Acronis :thumb:

A note to Symantec - you may kindly take your buggy, badly designed products and your pathetic support and shove them where the sun don't shine - permanently.

 

[CaptainLecture]

I feel your pain.

I too have NvRAID. Tier 2 tech at Symantec said you need another recovery ISO to accomodate. I'll keep ya posted on it's success.

 

[Captain]

Just had to reply to your post on Norton Ghost 10.
I agree on the space cadet's... I think I spoke to more cadets than the entire Star Trek Enterprise... I got soooooooooo wound up with the running around repeating my problems as they where incapable of listening to or understanding the Queen's English, taking you for a complete fool and not having the ability to write down your original complaint... Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

My problem was (and still is..) trying to clone the hard drive.. If you already have Norton Internet security 2006 loaded on your source drive C: ..and you attempt to clone the drive to either an un-partitioned drive or D: drive, it removes the activation of Norton Antivirus from the source drive....Oh very clever!! So.... again, many calls to the "other department" Norton Internet security to give me back some activations again and then going on to say It was not possible to perform such copying due to licence conditions... Oh right, clever...so why do they sell the darn thing in the same box as Internet Security 2006 and state you can clone a drive if yor old one needs upgrading...derrrrrrrrr!!!!!!

So... after climbing down off the ceiling... I'm now to the point of giving up on Norton... What a total bunch of..... !!! Beam me up scotty.. I think I would have been better off ringing up my local Indian takeaway, at least I think they would have thrown in a free meal for the time I spent on the phone!

Am I still seething... hahahaha.. what do you think?

Roy

 

[Formula99]

I hear you brother!

Try Acronis - I have had no problems with the latest version apart from some issues which were my own stupid fault in the end. The Acronis support was a breath of fresh air and they identified the problem straight away without the need to resort to mind altering drugs to get over the experience.

I hope Symantec goes the way of the dinosaur in the very near future.

Gits.

:roll:

 

[Nostromo2]

I havent read all that... but have u tryed clicking F6 while norton ghost 10 boot disk loading and load your sata/raid driver from floppy?

 

[Formula99]

Yep - been there tried that. According to the Symantec space cadets, drivers for all SATA drives are native as opposed to relying on the manufacturers drivers as per Ghost v9 and before it. This has been done to improve drive compatibility - apparantly :roll:

Oh, so that explains why none of my SATA's are recognised, on and also an IDE drive!!!!!!!

You try explaining the absurdity of this to the Symantec space cadets and see how long you keep your sanity / temper for.......?

As I said just DO NOT load this peice of crap on your system.

 

[Nostromo2]

Whatt means native drivers?

 

[tcuthill]

Er, this does work although Symantec do not have a clue.

You can't load the drivers from diskette as with the XP CD . Both Ghost 9 and 10 will load one and only one additional driver at boot (they go through the motions for the second and then forget about it).

Ghost 10 includes native driver support for Nvidia RAID. The problem is that it's for the Nforce 2 chipset (and works well for this platform). Allowing the Recovery disk to boot on Nforce4 without loading anything produces a good, solid hang at initialisation.

The solution is simple. Load only the nvatabus.sys driver but not the RAID driver. The internal one works perfectly happily with Nforce 4. I have successfully used this technique to restore my RAID 0 setup (MSI K8N Neo4 FI) when changing the stripe size.

Alternatively you can download the RAID manual from Nvidia and follow the instructions for "slipstreaming" the drivers into the XP disk to do same for the Ghost Recovery disk (it's not 100% the same, but there's enough there to work it out). This technique can get a Ghost 9 setup going.

Don't all thank me at once.

Tim

 

[Formula99]

Well thanks very much for that tip and congrats on finding a solution!

Unfortunately, Symantec products have been removed from my System on lets say a fairly permanent basis after this incident. Acronis is working pretty well and I don't see the need to go back to Ghost now. I hope others will be able to verify your solution.

BTW - How does your solution address the fact that my IDE drive did not show up in the recovery mode. Its not on a RAID array and as I said, its a simple bog standard IDE drive which is fully recognised by BIOS.

On a final note to anyone at Symantec who may read this post. Can I suggest that you consider firing whoever is responsible for

a) The technical development of this product
b) Whoever was responsible for sourcing your quite increadibly incompetant off -shore support service
c) The team responsible for testing the product with well known Disk drivers / management SW

Oh, and you might consider hiring people like tcuthill who seem to be able to figure out solutions to your flawed products themselves.

 

[riser]

If you're running a RAID and Symantec doesn't support raids.. well, then it would be your fault for not researching the limitations of the software.

Chances are your drives are not showing up because they're being run as a RAID through your motherboard.. which is probably seeing them differently and limits the software to see the individual drives.

I would have recommended breaking your RAID and seeing if the drives showed up.

For that matter.. I use 9.0 but I still use the old ghost.exe to do my cloning from DOS and what not.

 

[Formula99]

Please read my orignal post carefully and you will see that my hardware RAID array works fine. My other drives are individual SATA's and IDE's and are not on RAID arrays at all - these are the one's not working and hence my annoyance with Symantec's pathetic excuses regarding "exotic" drives and software based RAID drivers.

Ghost 10.0 is a flawed product - period.

 

[tcuthill]

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I dived in with my ego-massaging response without reading the original post carefully enough. Sorry.

Still can't see how Ghost RE can't access a bog-standard IDE though. Can a straight XP CD boot see this with no extra drivers? SATA 2 setups often require same when implemented as bus mounted chipsets rather than natively, especially with NCQ in the pot.

Anyhow, the reason that I stuck with Ghost is that it's fast (and I've paid for it:-( ). What backup / restore times are you getting with Acronis and what volumes are you dealing with? "Real world" please, I used to have a copy of Dantz Retrospect and dead snails over adhesive surfaces are faster - although you wouldn't get that from their quoted figures.

I'm open to change here as I'm not overly enamoured with Symantec support myself. There's an old adage that says that "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys". Considering the call centre costs in India these days, I reckon Symantec's peanut budget must be on the low side. That particular outsourcing exercise should be enough to put anybody off.

I'd certainly be prepared to shell a few washers on a solution that offered the same performance, especially if it worked well and was supported by people who a) knew slightly more about their software than me and b) knew that Windows did more than let the light in.

 

[schatzoy]

I have also purchased Ghost 10 and face a problem during creation of an image that spans accross more than one DVD. After inserting the second DVD Ghost won't continue burning the remainder of the image. I have just sent a problem ticket to Symantec but doubt I will get a decent answer.
Anyway I should have never allowed any Symantec product on my PC based on my previous experiences. But I wanted to upgrade from Powerquest Drive Image 7.0. And since Symantec has aquired Powerquest I thought I was on the safe side. What a fool I have been...

By the way....stay off Acronis True Image. It's a piece of crap that won't even back-up on or restore from DVD.

Just my 2 cents...from a pi..ed of Symantec customer

 

[milleron]

Another Ghost 10 story.
Ghost 9 wouldn't work on my new XPSP2 system at all. It gave a BSOD within 2 seconds after starting to launch Windows, saying it couldn't load PQV2i.sys. Symantec tech support gave up, and Symantec engineering stopped responding to emails.

I like Ghost's ability to limit the number of backup sets and overwrite the oldest one with the newest one. Acronis True Image doesn't have this functionality at all, so I gave Ghost 10 a try. It seemed to run fine for a month or two, and then I started to get many kinds of crashes. The computer could never remain on for more than 12 hours without crashing completely, and there were just too many different kinds of BSODs to even list here, not to mention lots of message boxes in Windows about many different apps suddenly encountering problems and having to close. The troubleshooting was very difficult; it took several weeks because Ghost 10 wasn't the chief suspect. I didn't suspect it initially because the problem seemed to start a while after it was installed. Because of the many, many different crash scenarios, I suspected hardware more than software. But, to make an agonizingly long story short, it was Ghost 10 and nothing but Ghost 10. I ditched that piece of shit, and my computer has been 100.00% stable for going on two weeks now. I LOVED Drive Image and PowerQuest's V2i Protector, but Symantec somehow managed to screw them up beyond any recognition. I knew they would, I just figured that they couldn't do it immediately. I've used Symantec products for 16 years, but after my current NAV subscription runs out, I'll be saying goodbye to them forever.

Ron

 

[schatzoy]

Thank for the story Ron.

I have done what had to be done. I have ditched that Ghost 10 bitch as well. After having it removed there were still some 250 entries in the registry. I made sure they were gone, too. I do not want to have a single trace from that crappy product on my computer.

Never ever will I allow a Symantec product on my PC again.

 

[smallpotato]

Really sorry to hear about your support woes. I'm actually not overly enthusiastic with Acronis' True Image 9 either. I've been active on Wilders Security - Official Acronis Support Forum trying to figure out some way to make a large system recovery image on Dual Layer DVD+R media.

Using Acronis' current build 3567 True Image 9 it is left to you to find some 3rd party burning software -in addition to True Image to burn images to CD, DVD, or supposedly D/L DVD. From what I understand (and what Symantec Ghost 10 support rep. Vinay says) Ghost 10 includes burning software allowing you to make an image directly on your removable media.

I have the modest goal of simply getting a recovery image over 4GB in size (one file archive .tib) from my HDD to the D/L DVD+R media which holds 8.5GB. I'm currently looking for D/L DVD+R burning software which will not splice and dice the source onto the disc such as my Nero Express 6 does. I really do not like the Nero 6 interface. Nero 5 seemed much better and didn't make so many burning assumptions.

Does anyone have any ideas on whether Ghost 10 or True Image 9 with ____ burning software will work for the objective I've detailed? Maybe some other imaging software is better? Clone family of products? Alcohol?

The Ghost 10 and True Image 9 reviewers online must be getting kickback checks or perks if these products are so wonderful. All of the user issues for both products has me concerned.

 

[kinaK]

So if Ghost should receive and exorcism and True Image 9 is no good? What do I use to image my RAID 0.

I have this [SATA 2x 120Gb] RAID 0 set up on a Promise 20378 controller [Asus Mobo P4c800 e delux] for a few years now with a bunch of equipment etc hanging off it. So i was thinking to myself I better image the RAID 0 set in case one of those SATA drives die or get a temporary knot in the knickers.

It would take me a month to set everything up again.

I thought to myself..hmm how about I put in a single IDE 250+Gb HDD and then image the 'disk' of the RAID 0 set - since they are getting cheap enough now.

If one disk does corrupt itself or totally dies i can simply install an identical SATA 120Gb HDD and - set up the RAID 0 again in BIOS {if neccessary} and then "simply" restore the disk image straight from the IDE 250+Gb drive - and bingo everything will be identical to before the crash.

This is a good theory - but I know Symantec have always said they dont guarantee results with RAID configurations. But I thought True Image 9 did work with RAID0?

Are there any others out there? Is True Image 9 not competent?

I definately dont want to set up a RAID 0 + 1 - I just want a single back up image from time to time.

what to do. 8O

 

[smallpotato]

Well, I have since received some apologies from Symantec. They corrected themselves and told me that Ghost 10 does not burn todisc. They also require 3rd party burning software such as Nero or Roxio. The limitations of media is also the same. They'll support the actual hardware burners, but not the media insofar as burning directly unless UDF packet burning to specific types of previously formatted discs. What this means is that unless you can figure a way to get past the 2GB ISO limitation then you'll have to split your image if over 2GB in size.

True Image 9 uses various compression for images to cut down on the overall image size, but if your image is 6 to 8 GB like mine then you need to split it up and put it on numerous discs or possibly 1 D/L disc. I haven't tested this as I'm not sure that a couple 2GB split up archives for one big image can be reassembled successfully.

I have DVD-R's, D/L DVD+R's, and CD-R's to work with. Obviously I'm not going to bother with the small capacity of CD-R's. Buying CD rewritable discs is not in my gameplan. So I'll try the "2 step method" which entails burning an image to the HDD, then using True Image to split it up into a couple archives. Once that is done I need to figure out how to coax my OEM Nero 6 Express to burn those 2GB slices onto either DVD's or a D/L DVD. By default the backup options in Nero likes to use it's own imaging extensions and a directory on the burnt disc which will not work for True Image.

Why can't these big software companies include the burning software (one stop shop) and make things less of a tweaking ordeal is beyond me. Probably because they'd need to invest in making it compatible with all the various models and firmware of burners plus the various types of media brands and capacities. Sometimes I think I should have just got an external HDD and do it that way. But discs take less space and can be stored in a drawer as a recovery option when the primary system's HDD takes a dive.

 

[turbo76542]

I'm sorry to hear that you're having so many problems with Ghost 10. I am currently using this software and I think it is great! I have a RAID 0 setup on an MSI K8N Diamond mobo using the nVidia RAID and all I had to do was provide the diskette with the driver and I was all set. I even was able to restore my system from the network. The only problem I had was the fact that I had to install a floppy drive, but other than that, I'm happy with everything.

And to correct some posts: You can load the nVidia nForce4 RAID driver to recover the system. It works just like 2000/XP to load these drivers. You just have to pick the correct driver from the list.

Good luck to those still having problems.

 

[daviangel]

Er, this does work although Symantec do not have a clue.

You can't load the drivers from diskette as with the XP CD . Both Ghost 9 and 10 will load one and only one additional driver at boot (they go through the motions for the second and then forget about it).

Ghost 10 includes native driver support for Nvidia RAID. The problem is that it's for the Nforce 2 chipset (and works well for this platform). Allowing the Recovery disk to boot on Nforce4 without loading anything produces a good, solid hang at initialisation.

The solution is simple. Load only the nvatabus.sys driver but not the RAID driver. The internal one works perfectly happily with Nforce 4. I have successfully used this technique to restore my RAID 0 setup (MSI K8N Neo4 FI) when changing the stripe size.

Alternatively you can download the RAID manual from Nvidia and follow the instructions for "slipstreaming" the drivers into the XP disk to do same for the Ghost Recovery disk (it's not 100% the same, but there's enough there to work it out). This technique can get a Ghost 9 setup going.

Don't all thank me at once.

Tim

You must work for symantic or did in the past since you know more than they seem to about their own software!
Anyways what you seem to hit the nail on the head since I just got ghost 10 and booting from the recovery cd locks up on me since I am using an nforce4 motherboard.
Only way to get it to work is to load the nvidia nforce drivers using F6 option. It still dog slow to boot up compared to ghost 2003 though since you are really booting up a mini version of windows 2003 from what I can tell. Once it is working it is faster than 2003 since I was able to back up and restore a windows xp install with office 2003,visual studio 2005,etc adding up to 20gigs in about 28min using an external firewire drive.
I also tried the older ghost 2003 since you get it in box when you buy ghost 10 and the 2003 cd boots up fine without locking using nforce4 but is slower taking about 2x longer for same backup I mentioned above a little under 60min.
If you are backing up this much data or more don't even bother with dvd since you'll be spending at least 2hr or more not to mention that ghost 10 still doesn't support backing up to dvd dual layer(says so on ghost 10 faq on symantic website somewhere) which is the only way I would back up to dvd since I would need at least 3 or more disk.
Lastly one thing that does concern me about installing ghost 10 in windows is that it slows down my logon time to about 1min which is unacceptable. I don't know what it's doing or what services it's trying to run while I'm trying trying to login but I know norton ghost 10 is the reason since it started right after I installed it and if I uinstall it the long logon times disappear.
Oh yeah and just to reiterate what's already been mentioned the ghost 10 website tech support is a joke.
If I was advanced computer user as norton puts it I would've already returned this software and got my money back but since it works and I got it for free anyway after $70 fry's rebate I won't bother now.