Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
4 Posts
0
59159
USB Hard Drive Not Accessible when Booting from Norton Ghost 10 CD Recovery Environment
I appear to have a problem that prevents the use of an external USB hard drive for Norton Ghost 10 recovery points as such drives cannot be seen (fail to be mounted) when booting directly from the Norton Ghost 10 CD on my Dell XPS-400, as required to restore my drive in emergency situations. Does anyone else have the same problem?
This can be checked by using the F12 key while the BIOS screen is visible during reboot and selecting "Boot from Internal or USB CD-ROM" with the Norton Ghost CD in place. If you have an external USB drive plugged into the back of your computer, you should be able to see it listed (but not necessarily with its normal drive letter) in the Recovery Point Browser (analyze/explore...) panel.
As an aside I would like to state that I believe that a large external USB drive (300GB) is the best option for recovery point storage (if it would work) as it allows a long history of incremental backups to be retained and can be installed as a plug-and-play consumer device without risking the integrity of the system by opening the case. I found the D:Backup drive partition too small, even for one recovery point, so I used the Norton Ghost utility to merge that partition to the C: drive.
This problem appears only on my Dell XPS-400. On my Dell Dimension 4700c, Norton Ghost 10 has no problem with external USB hard drive access. I assume something is either lacking or broken on the XPS system.
This problem is highly unusual as the CD resident, Norton Ghost 10 Recovery Environment operating system is (and must be) almost totally independent of the status of the hard drive and the installed Windows XP software
MLB
Message Edited by MLBar on 10-19-200604:09 AM
Message Edited by MLBar on 10-19-2006 04:11 AM
kirkd
5.2K Posts
0
October 19th, 2006 17:00
MLBar
4 Posts
0
October 21st, 2006 10:00
Has anyone been able to access recovery points stored on USB hard drives from the WinPE-based, Norton Ghost Recovery Environment on a Dell XPS-400 or is this a general coding or design problem with this system?
MLB
Message Edited by MLBar on 10-21-2006 06:55 AM
MLBar
4 Posts
0
November 29th, 2006 04:00
As a result of recent evidence, and posts on another forum, I have come to believe that this problem is a drive letter assignment issue, possibly as a result of the system RAID drivers being loaded after the USB drives are installed.
On a test with two external USB drives connected, a bare-bones, Base Microsoft WinPE CD (provided by Symantec) sees these drives as C:\ and D:\ but does not see the system RAID drive, presumably because the drivers to do so are lacking.
On the other hand, the Norton Ghost 10 Recovery environment does see the system RAID drive as C:\ and does *not* assign drive letters to the USB drives. Consequently the Norton Ghost 10 software cannot access these USB drives.
However, in the legacy Norton Ghost 8.2 mode these two USB drives are visible as drives 2.1 and 3.1 and their file structure is accessible. For reference, in this mode, the Dell Restore partition is visible as drive 1.1 and the Dell Utility partition can be seen as drive 1.3 or 1.4.
Contrary to my original assertion, it appears that the Ghost Recovery Environment does attempt to read the system registry on drive C:\ so that it can assign mounted drives their normal drive designations, but it appears this process fails in the case of the USB drives, perhaps because the earlier assignments do not match the required registry values.
I now think this problem may not be occurring on my Dell 4700c because it does not have a RAID drive array.
I hope this helps.
MLB