Any Norton Ghost 12 users / experts out there?

[Joey Beltram]

dose.

I am usually fairly anal when it comes to backups, and have been a keen user of the DOS version of ghost for years - with no problems.

So, was testing Ghost 12 and I was fairly happy with it. So, built my new AMD beast, built a dual boot XP / Vista with a extra data partition. all was well, backing up - no bodder.

so, after a few months vista was slowing down because I was installing too much crap on it, "who cares I have a backup..." the XP os was a mini XP audio OS, running like a fu**ing rocket, well happy with it - dual boot no problems.

So, time to restore backup I was expecting a few MBR issues as there was going to be 2 OS partitions restored.

turns out I can’t restore both - at all! If I restore Vista, it work fine, as soon as I restore the XP partition & reboot, no matter how much giggery-pokery I try with the MBR / Hirens / boot loaders, I can’t get the dual boot back, I can only force a boot or 1 OS using PQboot (available on ghost recovery cd) even if I restore XP first, then vista, same shit no dual boot - no workey - I have tried it all!

so after a little web hounding, turns out that the fuc**ing Ghost 12 DOES NOT SUPPORT dual boot backups / restore nice.

so, scrap the vista partition, its crap anyway. I just resorted the audio OS, works perfectly.

Now, tried to install Vista, same way you would install vista after a XP installation, and it gets fucked. (the vista DVD is ok as I low level formatted & installed to check) during the vista installation, it goes as far as the 1st time that a reboot is required, then after the POST, where the boot menu should show .....nothing...... fucker!

I have tried all combinations known to man at this stage and just decided to scrap the whole lot and re-install both OS from scratch.

such a pain as I still have the backup of the audio OS image, and when I restore it works grand!!!! (I have backed up all the files off it so no data loss...)

any suggestions / ideas?

[thread_killer]

Sounds horrible. Did you try to boot them both using the newer Vista boot loader. That should be able to boot XP.

So, 'dd' for backing up partitions like that, not Ghost. dd comes standard with all Linux/Unix. OSX too probably. On all live distro's, etc.

Backup MBR and first partition.

 dd if=/dev/sda of=./mbr.bin bs=512 count=1 
 dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/backups/new/first_partition.bin

Restoring

 dd if=./mbr.bin of=/dev/sda 
dd if=/mnt/backups/thisone.bin of=/dev/sda1

It gets a wee bit more complicated when restoring to a new disc, or to a new PC, but doable, very.

[Joey Beltram]

yip.tried vista boot pro & vista native boot loader, no joy

what a dose!!!

anyhoo, I have the partitions rebuilt now, what a waste of time tho...

just going to make 1 backup of the whole hard drive now & increment my documents to a seperate archive, not a optimal backup setup really.

yea, i heard of dd, can i run that from a bootable distro?

[thread_killer]

Yes it does. Runs from most places. Even cut-down things like BusyBox should have dd I think.

You should look at something like dar for doing backups. It's great. Like tar but with more sensible defaults for backing stuff up and more options.

http://dar.linux.free.fr/doc/Features.html