Ghost Solution Suite

I have created a partition image a little while ago in case something goes wrong.   And  it did today, partly an operator error, but I wasn't too worried because I had the partition imaged.  At least not until I tried to restore it and got "Application Error 10052"   (corruption in image file) from both of my backups.  :(

The files are in a separate partition that is not used for anything else, so I find it exceedingly unlikely that they were corrupted after creation. 

My setup could be a bit oddball, partition 1: 255 GB NTFS boots Win7 (Boot); partition 2: 127 GB FAT32 for backups, all in sepate directories of \1\, \2\,  etc.;  partition 3: 1 TB NTFS; partition 4: whatever's left over on a 2 TB drive. 

System was booted with a DOS (Win98SE) boot floppy and the Boot partition image was created with GHOST.EXE without any problem.

Any idea on what's going on, or how to fix it?   Is this a result of an integer overflow bercause of a disk/partition size that didn't exist when this version was created?   Will a more recent version restore from image files created with an older version?

TIA

I believe that your problem is caused by the size of partition 1, and also the inability of PCDOS to "see" SATA drives.

The limit of 32 bit disk addressing is around 132Gb - I recall a few years ago, having to upgrade the bios on a Promise ATA controller card so that it would support 48bit disk addressing and allow me to use 200gb drives. If I recall correctly, 48 bit addressing only came with the SP1 release of XP.

Consequently, I do not believe that a DOS boot can address a partition beyond the 132 Gb limit. Like you, I used FAT32 partitions for Ghost images, but unlike you, I placed them after the operating system's 40Gb allocation, and this works fine for making and restoring backups.

However, there are two questions that cannot be answered at the moment - the first is whether your images are viable, as it would appear from your posting that you have never tested a restore until now. The second is whether you may be able to restore by booting WinPE instead of PCDOS, as WinPE does support SATA and also has no issues with disk addressing. It also allows Ghost images to be written to NTFS drives so you don't have to tie up hard disk space on the less efficient FAT32 formatting.

One thing worth trying, is to set your hard disk to compatibility mode via the bios first of all, as this would make the drive look like an ATA drive and give PCDOS a chance to see the partitions. However, I suspect that the position of your FAT32 partition is going to be the stumbling block.

My article Adventures with WinPE Symantec Connect covers the creation of a WinPE boot device, and I have used this with Ghost 2003 for imaging machines, so I know it all works.  Since WinPE can mount USB devices, you can also access your operating system partition and copy any files you need to a backup hard disk, should you find that your images are not recoverable.  

Since a total hard disk failure would lose you both the operating system and your backup images, I would strongly suggest that you keep your images on a separate device as well as the hard disk.

The controller was already set to combination, and I have verified that there's no issue with writing/reading to/from that FAT32 partition. 

In any case, I just installed a copy of a  Ghost Solution Suite 2.5, and with that I could easily create a PE based Ghost boot CD, which in turn allowed me to do a restore from the original image files.  So the files are apparently good, it's just that the old copy couldn't handle its own image file.... 

The image files are already on optical media, it's just that my restores are normally needed because:

a) SW problem

b) operator error  :(

Thanks for the tips.