Ghost Solution Suite

I made a backup of a disk with one partition in GSS 2.0. It created a 67 GB GHO-file, which covers 95% of the partition data, then it ran out of space.
Now the hard disk is broken an this turns out to be our only backup.
I have tried this:
1) I try to open the file in Ghostexp.exe it asks "please select the file for the last segment in this image file".
Result: Not possible to open GHO-file.

2) I boot a Ghost-WinPE CD and restore a partition from the GHO-file. The program reads all the files in the image and saves them do disk. Then it asks for the next image file. After aborting the program all that is left is a new unformatted partition. Very frustrating!

3) I repeat the procedure in 2) but instead i run ghost32.exe within windows XP SP3 to restore the partition. When i reboot it goes into checkdisk, processes all files and nothing is left.

It is very frustrating. I have almost all of my data in the GHO-file. I get them written to disk. And the POW! it vanishes. My situation is essentially the same as for someone who lost an image segment due to corrupt media. I´m gently asking you (symantec) to provide us a way to handle those situations where a whole image file set is not available.

In your knowledgebase article about how to handle a corrupted image file: service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/on-technology.nsf/docid/2000051614544325 you mention using ghostexp with command line switches -corrupt or -ignorindex. I tried that to no avail.

best regards
/Alexander

Explorer has immense difficulty dealing with incomplete NTFS filesystems in .GHO images, because they are stored in a manner quite unlike the format in which FAT and ext filesystems are stored in .GHO files. For FAT and ext2, the index at the end of the image is all that Explorer needs to consult, and the "-ignoreindex" switch is used really only for those two situations. That switch has never really done anything for NTFS data, however, since for NTFS it is necessary for Explorer to inspect the raw NTFS filesystem structure in the .GHO to reconstruct the tree view of the image content.

Losing an entire NTFS image span is not something that can be readily recovered from, and even with the improvements I have made Explorer is still not always able to recover some data. In particular, it is still absolutely necessary for the initial .GHO to be present and be mostly intact, since the most critical NTFS structures are present at the start of the image.

However, I have been making  small improvements to Explorer's handling of damaged images over time. Making it able to at least try and recover something from an image missing an entire span (including the final index span) is something I did only after the release of GSS2.5 - I do have a build of Explorer which can be used to attempt a partial recovery, and which at present can be obtained from me personally by e-mail to the address in my forum profile.

Alexander, if you can try e-mailing me again that would be great, but this time if you could e-mail directly with a normal e-mail client rather than through Connect; if you didn't see it (due to how badly designed the Connect profile system is) my current e-mail contact address is nigel.bree@gmail.com 

I have tried ghostexp build 2179 on backed up NTFS-partitions. If I drop the last image span the program will recover nothing.