TrueImage with Norton Ghost 2003 installed;

Hello everyone,

I'm writing on this board to just consult with other people on this problem instead of jumping into it head first and screwing everything up.

So, I'm running Windows XP on a gateway computer and I recently installed Norton Ghost 2003 which was a pretty huge mistake on my part. Regardless, for a while I couldn't even boot up the computer because the Norton Ghost partition was causing huge problems:

Question:

- Is it a problem if I already have Norton Ghost 2003 installed on my computer and then try to run Acronis True Image Home Edition? Can I go ahead and use it as normal? Do I need to uninstall Norton Ghost 2003?

Anyone's advice, suggestions or comments on this issue would help. I just feel scared about useing True Image because Norton Ghost 2003 really messed up my computer and I'm afraid of just making things worse.

Thank you!

 

Did you get caught in the Ghost 2003 Virtual Partition? The safe way to run Ghost 2003 is from the bootable CD so I suggest you uninstall Ghost 2003. Then you have the option of using both apps.

 

A couple of years ago I built a PC and installed GHOST 2003, which was supposed to handle external USB and firewire hard drives. But, it could not even see all my internal partitions (FAT32) when run from within XP. Symantec blamed that on my SATA hard drives, which sounded bogus, since XP and every other program could see all partitions. GHOST run from a floppy could see all partitions and could make/restore images to a second internal hard drive.

I also installed True Image 8, without uninstalling GHOST. TI8 could see my hard drives ! TI8 could make an image of any partition from within windows XP, without using any special partition, partial reboot, or other such tricks. Further, I found that TI really does support USB and firewire, whereas even run from a floppy GHOST 2003 was hit & miss with external disks.

Thus, my recommendations:

Install TI (8, 9, or 10), leaving GHOST or removing it, as you chose. Make TI's bootable CD, with a complete set of drivers (full option). Test making an image. For speed, make the image on either a different internal partition or on an external hard drive. Later you can play with making DVDs, if you wish, but those are really slow and more error prone. Then, test the bootable CD. Go through the restoration process to just before the final "OK". If TI can see your source image and target hard drive from the bootable CD, then the odds are very good that a restore will work.

If TI can not see the image and/or the hard drive, when run from the bootable CD, then you might have a driver issue, and should contact Acronis support. I had such an issue with an early version of TI8, until Acronis added drivers for my SATA controllers. The current version of TI supports a lot of different controllers, but new ones seem to popup every week or two. If you have plain IDE (ATA) hard drives, then drivers should not be an issue with TI.

Note: If you install TI9 or 10, avoid the snap restore option, unless you study it very carefully. This forum has had several posting in which the minuse of that option lead to losing data on partitions other than the one a yser was attempting to restore.

 

thanks for the advice on all of this. I find this process pretty overwhelming because I don't want to mess up any important data. I'm doing this on someone else's computer and really don't want to screw it up

 

what is all of your opinions on creating a backup in the acronis security zone versus cloning a hard drive? what are the pros and cons?

thanks.

 

If you can help it, do not use the SZ. What if the drive itself crashes - down goes your backup images also. Use an external drive to hold your images. And forget about optical media - way too slow and during a recovery/restore, you'll be caught in a disc swap limbo.

 

thanks ralphie, actually, I have the SZ on a different hard drive...so I have one hard drive that I can use exclusively for SZ.

However, I still like the idea of an external hard drive. Is there a specific one you would recommend? Also, how do you use your external hard drive? Where do you keep it?