Ghost Solution Suite

I created a Ghost image of a user's PC with version 11.0.1 spanned over (12) 4 GB files written to a USB hard drive.  Everything went well and I was able to open the image up with Ghost Explorer 11.5.  I reimaged the users PC and now when I try to open the GHO file to restore his data Ghost Explorer says "Not a ghost image file".  I can't run any integrity checks or reimage because Ghost doesn't see this file as a Ghost image.

Its obvious to me that something happened to corrupt the file/header information.  I would be more than willing to send this file to someone at Symantec and they could use it for testing and possibly fix the file for me.  Does anyone know who I could contact?

I've tried to open the image in ghost explorer 11.5.1.2266 and I get the same error.  I've tried the switches -corrupt and -ignoreindex and that hasn't worked either.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Les

The one person who might have been able to help you is no longer with Symantec.  I hope I am proved wrong, but I somehow doubt anyone at Symantec will offer to look at your file unless you open a chargeable support call at the very least.

Do you always close and release your USB drive from device manager before unplugging it? Most people do not and this could easily cause a file to be wrecked if it is still being written to at the time the drive is unplugged.

Although it's too late for this situation, I would recommend backing up user data with a free tool like Robocopy, to a separate hard disk, USB or otherwise, so that the original data remains uncompressed and any corruption is likely to affect one or two files and not the whole shebang.  I have used Ghost for many years, well before it became part of Symantec's portfolio, and was burned more than once by an image not being recoverable for one reason or another.

I've definitely learned my lesson and I will now run integrity checks as well as use another form of backup.  This is what happens in a rush.

When you say the one person that may have helped is gone are you referring to Nigel Bree? He seems to be the saving grace in many of these posts.  I am going to contact our account rep and see what I can get done.  I think we would be willing to pay to have someone look at this.

It was indeed Nigel I was referring to - perhaps you should send him an email through Connect to see if anything can be done on a private basis, or at least he may point you at the next most likely source of assistance before you tackle your account rep.