In an earlier post I mentioned how much I had loved "GoBack" (Wildfile,Roxio) when I had W98. I found that Norton's 4.0 however had seemed to have conflict issues with my Dell 8400 WXP. After talking with several Dell techs, 1 clean install and 2-3 DFFRs I decided to leave it off.

 

As sort of a compromise, I purchased Norton Ghost 9.0. It seemed okay...I made a ghost image of my healthy HD and felt secure "knowing" that I had a default system should future problems arise (yay, no more clean installs/DFFRS). The moment came...I had a few strange OS moments and I reached for the 9.0 Ghost disk (figured to nip the problem early and at the same time make sure the Ghost Machine works). I booted up from the disk (after a quick start-up bios change)...and started working throught the process. The Noton Wizard asked for the image location...I found the Ghost file on my Iomega External HD...I clicked open...all was going well, and then I hit "next". This is when everything went fuzzy. The wizard asked me where do I want to put this new file. Obviously I wanted to put it in my "C" internal HD (Norton gives different letter designations i.e. not "C", but no problem)...that however was not an option...the *only* option I had listed was my Iomega *external* HD (where my Ghost image was stored...clearly not correct). There was no mention of my internal drive.

 

Long story short, I tried everything...including contacting Symantec. Their techs were nice but without clue. They said they'd call back within two days..."guaranteed". Two days have come and gone...no call. Guess it was too tough for them.

 

I went through this process 4 times, from restart to restart...no change. Except each time I closed the wizard and restarted my computer (without the ghost image correction), my OS became corrupted. Each start-up my desktop opened with the Windows System 32 file opening. Each time I used Windows Restore and this seemed to clear up the problem. Each time I tried the Ghost Wizard and it failed and then restarted the computer, the Windows 32 window again opened on my desktop...and I would do a restore and then with no Ghost Wizard attempts I would restart the computer to make sure things were okay ...and no Windows 32 File on startup. Thus the problem lies with Norton Ghost.

 

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why the Wizard does not show my internal drive?

After all the problems I had with GoBack, this Ghost problem has me asking...Is Norton/Symantec just buggy software in general and best avoided at all costs? Are there any better HD backup alternatives?

 

Thank you!