Ghost Solution Suite

I've been beating my head against a wall for a week now and don't understand what is happening here. I have a harddrive with 10 different partitions of NTFS, FAT32, and EXT3. Among these partitions, there is a group of logical FAT32 partitions. One of these partitions is 60GB. Before creating my image, I run Chkdsk /F on all my FAT32/NTFS partitions. This is the ghost command I'm using to create my image.

Ghost32.exe -batch -ib –split=1024 –z6 –clone,mode=create,src=3,dst=c:\ghostimages\myimage.gho

After image creation is complete, I'll immediately restore the image back to the drive. Once complete, the 60GB partition will be there, but disk manager shows it as being OUTSIDE the logical partition group and it will not be mountable. No matter what I do, the 60GB partition will not mount! (windows doesn't give it a drive letter and it doesn't show up in "My Computer") Is there any limitation on ghost with creating FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB?

You have not mentioned what version of Ghost you are using, and also not specified whether you are booting to DOS or WinPE.

You also need to give specific information about your partition structure.

Please bear in mind that a hard disk can have up to four primary partitions. If you are imaging a logical drive that is contained within an extended partition, then I suspect this is being restored as another extended partition, and perhaps exceeding your allowable partition count.

Rather than trying to back up a logical drive, try backing up the entire extended partition.

I'm using ghost 11.5.1 build 2266. I'm just booted into winxp and I'm using ghost32 to image a connected sata drive(non boot drive) to image and then restoring the image back to the drive.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by backing up the entire excended partition. I want to back up the whole drive. The drive already contains 4 primary partitions and one extended partition with multiple logical drives. I need them all contained in the same drive image.

I think you're right that the 60GB logical drive is getting added as a second extended partition and breaking things but I don't know why that is happening.

My suspicion is that you are exceeding the MBR limits imposed by most system bioses.

There is a four primary partition limit on any single drive. If you have an extended partition containing logical drives, then this extended partition is treated as one of the four primary partitions, so your technical limit is therefore three primary and one extended.

I've searched around on the internet and verified that my memory of the partition limits is correct. 

As a test, it may be useful to create a test hard disk with one or two primary partitions and the rest as logical drives in an extended partition, copy over some random data, and try the backup and restore on the test drive to see if it does turn out to be a partition count problem.  Again, this is less to do with the operating system and more to do with the way that the bioses handle disk drives.

Bearing in mind also that the Ghost code is essentially unchanged in the last few years, it is likely that the coding imposes the MBR limits quite rigorously.