Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

After wasting two days trying to copy my old hard drive to a new hard drive, I gave up using this tool for that purpose. I think the problem was the new HD was formatted incorrectly to be a bootable drive. The software has a Copy Master Boot Record option, but it never made the drive bootable. This software never tells you the result will not be bootable. Even if it did there is no option to repartition the HD with either Ghost or plain XP options. If you want to migrate your primary HD to a new larger HD, use Acronis Migrate Easy since it is half the price and has the ability to adjust your partitions to be bootable. I think Norton wants this to be purely backup software. As a backup software its buggy. If you have SQL Server installed, you probably run into the COM Surrogate error. I hate the way the software is presumptuous. I didnt need a LiveUpdate in the control panel. Ghost gives you a startup tray app that scans HDs on startup. This slows up the bootup and I dont see how you can turn it off. Since backup software comes with Windows not sure this is worth $70.

I upgraded from Ghost 9.0 to the latest version Ghost 14.0 just prior to receiving my new Windows 7 computer. I was totally p****d when I learned that I could not access my backups on my external hard drive with Ghost 14.0. After contacting Symantec I learned that they are working on Ghost 15.0 but could not supply me with a date (this occurred approx.Nov.12) I will NOT buy 15.0, because Win 7 has a decent integrated backup. :-)

Had a system drive going out on a PC running Vista Home Premium. Bought a new, larger hard drive to replace the one about to die. Ghost doc describes my exact scenario and gives very simple instructions for using the drive copy feature to copy a system drive onto a new drive, which should subsequently be able to serve as the system drive. Copy was made successfully, but new drive wasnt bootable. Found clues on various forums (though not from Nortons knowledge base, which was about as superficial as the Ghost user guide) regarding how the target drive should be prepared (e.g., formatting, allocation, partitions, etc.) as well as advice to use backup and recover instead of drive copy. In the end, the dying system drive was successfully replaced by backing up the drive to an external hard drive, removing the dying drive, installing the new internal drive, and doing a recovery from the backup onto the new drive (which was formatted and had one single unallocated partition). After performing the recovery, the PC booted to new system drive without a hitch. Ghost worked great once I was properly armed with useful information on how to use it. PC is running well on the new hard drive and I am now using Ghost to do full drive backups on a nightly basis. Software seems good. Just dont rely on the documentation or online knowledge base to tell you how to successfully use it if youre doing anything more complicated than simply scheduling backups.

Norton Ghost is a program that lets you back up your computer in the following ways: 1. Drive based backup: Backups the complete disk drive. This is my choice... if the hard disk fails, I can put in a new drive and get the system back in less than an hour. I also use this type of back up to refresh my system every few months... I install a new copy of Windows and all of my basic software, run a backup and anytime my system gets junked up and running slow, I just restore it back. 2. File and folder based backup: This backs up selected files and folders. Faster backing up but a lot longer to get a crashed system restored. You have to reinstall windows and all of your software before restoring the data. 3. Drive copy: Very useful when you want to upgrade your hard disk to a larger one. Ghost also has some nice features: 1. The ability to backup to another hard disk or a network drive. 2. The option to create a recovery disk specific to your computer. This option creates a CD or DVD with the drivers from your computer that will boot it so that you can run Ghost to recover your hard disk. You can create a generic one, but the specific one is much safer. 3. The option to back up another computer from yours (assuming your connected via a network). 4.Conversion to a Virtual Disk format: This is not a backup but something you do to a backup. This converts a drive based backup to an image that can be run in VMware or Microsofts Virtual Server. If you dont know what it is, you dont need it (and most people dont). This is the one function that didnt work for me. I tried to load a Vista image in VMware and after a load of messages about Vista configuring things, it crashed. Conclusion: As is typical with Symantec products, It works and works well (except for the Virtual Disk format using VIsta and VMware). The software is fairly easy to use, but if youre new to this type of software you will need to read the manual.

When creating a system recovery disk, I received a message stating that the 32 bit drivers included in the system recovery disk would not be usable to reboot my system. This was good to know. I was then presented with the option to create a custom recovery disk and tell Norton where to find the drivers that I wanted to add to my recovery disk. I will let you know how that works, once I figure out where the drivers reside on my system. I am pretty sure they reside in c:windowssysWOW64drivers but when I browsed that folder there were just a few files and I know there are many more drivers required to reboot my system to the point I can restore a backup. The reason I purchased Ghost was because I read so many bad reviews about the built in backup system for Windows operating systems. I am thinking it may be time to give the built in system for Vista Business 64X a try and not waste any more time trying to get Norton 14.0 to work. I was surprized to see how many other people are having diffculty using this product.

Ive been a fan of Norton products since the old DOS based Systemworks days and have also been a fan of their antivirus product. In the past few years, theyve made some acquisitions in order to offer complete security products. Their firewall didnt play nice with the antivirus so I ended up dropping them for competing software. With Ghost, I decided to give them another chance to see how it does backing up my hard drive. I have to hand it to them, the process was simple and smooth and easy to understand. For a simple backup program the procedure was painless. Backups using Ghost are much quicker than straight copying. I was able to copy about 100GB of data in about 30 min and the resulting images take up about 20% less space. They also include options to backup your My Documents folder and MSIE favorites links (why no Firefox?) If you believe your computer was infected with a virus, you also get an antivirus scanner as part of the recovery tools. That said, it has to be Norton AV in order for you to get the most recent updates or youre stuck with the older scanner on disk. Another nice feature is a driver verification feature that scans the drivers in your computer to make sure any necessary drivers in your computer are included on the recovery CD in case your computer fails. If something is missing, you can burn a custom recovery CD that will include all the drivers you will need. Scheduling backups is a simple and easily configurable process but they want you to image your backups. A drive to drive copy utility is included but it doesnt seem as automated as the imaging process. Plus youre not allowed to use it during trial mode. They do include utilities that assist you in copying to external drives or an offsite location via FTP. Another utility is included that will browse your image if youre only looking to recover a few files or folders. As long as your computer will boot from CD you should be able to start the recovery process via the recovery CD. Gripes: 1) My firewall kept notifying me Ghost was trying to connect to the Internet during the installation process without giving me a reason why. My refusal likely added a few extra minutes as it sat there trying to connect. Eventually it did install without problems. 2) Micro$oft has included a security feature which will cause the recovery to automatically reboot after 72 hours. In other words, you only have 72 hours to fix your problem if a drive fails. 3) In spite of all the recommendations about testing the recovery there doesnt seem to be any real way to verify backups were done properly unless you do a complete recovery. These seems strange to me but perhaps Im missing something. 4) Once installed Ghost is always present and running. They dont give us the option to shut down the program manually. While I didnt experience any problems, if it turns out the program or one of their running processes interferes with another one of your programs, tough luck for you. 5) Not allowing you to test the drive to drive copying method before registering is pretty retarded. UPDATE 3/22/09: The subject of restoration I wanted to address this issue specifically since this is where Ghost is getting a lot of complaints. Restoration does work, at least for my aging system and its EIDE hard drives. However the process itself is confusing and not very intuitive, much of the problem is caused by the program itself. I had an opportunity to play around with the program extensively as one of my hard drives failed. With a new hard drive and a lot of extra space to work with I decided to see how well it works restoring my Windows XP system. I started by making a number of incremental backups of my system drives. I then restored the latest incremental backup to a formatted drive and the complete system transferred successfully and was able to boot. The problem I had was, once the restoration wizard started, there was no way to get additional information from the help files about the process unless I cancelled and started over. Yes, even a simple help button was missing. This can lead an unexperienced user to make a number of mistakes, i.e. Restore original disk signature? Uh.. I dunno. Another retarded exclusion by Norton. They need to expand on what happens when you do or dont select each option. Ghost needs to guide the user through the process, not assume they know everything. Finally, once the process was finished I also noticed the drive letters were rearranged in my system. This may or may not be the fault of Ghost as Windows XP has an annoying habit of doing this, but it can create problems with programs that are searching for files or folders in a specific drive letter. Once that was fixed (Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management) the recovery worked fine. My experience with drive-to-drive copying was not so successful. Perhaps that was why they didnt let us test it out in trial mode. The copy was performed successfully, very quickly in fact (about 17GB in 9min), and the system did boot. The problem was the system drive became a different drive letter. Frankly I dont even know how to get the drive back to the standard C:. It even stuck the system paging file on one of my other drives that was renamed C:. There also seemed to be some problems accessing the boot.ini file using the tools on the recovery CD. Any time I tried to access the file the program would crash. So where does this leave us? At this point Im torn. I do like how quickly the backups are done and the compression done by the imaging system is nice in saving space. My initial experience shows Ghost does recover a system drive with some fussing. However I have been using another program called Casper XP for years. It does exactly what you want it to do, copies a partition or an entire drive without any hassles whatsoever. You dont even have to change the cables around inside your computer. If your main system drive has a problem, simply make your other drive the boot drive (usually a simple change in your BIOS) and everything boots up perfectly. Until Ghost finally gets it right and works as well as Casper, I dont think Ill switch. Since Ghosts imaging system does save disk space, I may keep it around to backup nonessential files on a periodic basis. Hope the review helped.

I have an older pc with an outdated version of Windows XP. After contracting a virus that forced me to wipe my computer clean, I decided to get Norton Ghost because I dont want to have to call Microsoft every time I need to reinstall the operating system. Its the peace-of-mind in knowing that even after a catastrophe, I can restore my computer to a save point. I havent had to use it, yet, though, knock on wood.

Great product and great price. Item was delivered in a timely manner. I have used Norton products in the past and seems to be a good data backup software.

i bought this product and it backed up my stuff fine. then it told me to make a recovery disk. thats when i found out it didnt work on 64 bit pcs. nortons tech support (after hours trying to get a hold of them) said I would need to find somewhere to order and download 32 bit drivers. also without this recovery disk you cannot restore your data. so if you have a 64 bit pc, dont waste your money here.

Great product, does what it is supposed to do, once it is installed, but the installation!!! Once I found the link that allowed their tech to figure out what was wrong, and that took me some doing, after I had tried to install it a couple of times, including using the Norton Utility that is supposed to clean out old Norton installations, it took the tech about an hour to figure out what the problems were and fix them. He was excellent, superb, obvioiusly in South Asia, and you have to be willing to allow them to take over your computer, but why was it so difficult (I run Windows XP on AMD Athlon) to install, and so hard to find the on line tech support link?