You need to call Dell Sales and complain about this and they should get the full version shipped out to you. You should not have gotten a trial version. There has been some confusion about this that they have been working to correct. If you do a search in the forum you will find numerous posts on this.

I agree, Norton Ghost....Phooey, as well as Dell Data Safe.

 

I purchased two Dimension E520s fully loaded with two 250 Gb SATA Drives using Raid 1 with an Intel ICH8R SATA Raid Controller.  After attempting to restore a saved configuration with Norton Ghost I find that the Norton Disk does not support a driver for the ICH8R controller and that  needs to be installed using a floppy dirve.  Of course these new computers do not come with a floppy dirve so you are out of luck.

 

Anyway, if you attempt to upgrade to Vista, the current version of Norton Ghost needs to be uninstalled.  That is why Dell does not offer Dell Data Safe yet on Vista machines.

 

Best Bet if you are in this position is not to upgrade to Vista just yet.  Wait until a company called Duo Cor puts out a version of Xactcopy for Vista.  This program acts like a software Raid1.  Then you can disable Raid 1 by pressing the proper keys at boot and entering the Intel Raid Setup.  Once the Raid mirror is broken, you will have two bootable drives.  Remove the second drive and boot onto the one installed disk.

 

Install Vista Upgrade and make sure it is running well.  Install a second hard drive of equal capacity as well as Xactcopy for Vista.  The program will then make a bit for bit copy of your Vista Hard Drive onto your second hard drive.  You can do this as often as you wish, normally after everything is working well and you do a virus scan.  This second drive will be bootable, and if you primary drive goes bad, all you have to do is remove the cable and boot to your secondary drive.  I have used this very successfully under Windows 98 as well as XP and I can attest that it works as advertised.

 

Repeat:  Do not upgrade to Vista if you have Dell Data Safe with dual hard drives and Norton Ghost.

 

 

I happen to have a USB floppy drive that I about a year ago planning on never buying another floppy drive. Now it will be useful as I won't upgrade to Vista for about 2 years. I don't want to be a beta tester I guess.

 

I'll contact sales about this.

 

Eric Johnson

 

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I'll contact sales about this.

 

Eric Johnson

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What was the result of your contact with sales?

 

ann

We finally got through to someone who could fix it though I don't remember the process.

 

Eric