Ghost Solution Suite

Hi Krish:

I have just found an older (12-18mos) Ghost Image (Ver 2003) that I would like to access if possible.  My problem occurred approx 3 months ago when I had a hard drive failure backing up a failing drive (both decided to "crash" simultaneously)!  I've tried everything to restore my older info, but alas its gone, gone, gone - by fluke I happened to find a very old iteration of part of the drive on another machine and would like to restore/extract part of that file if possible.  Upon using Ghost Explorer (2003) it reports a "Unable to open image file segment 2.....".  I've tried to re-open the image from several different machines w/Ghost installed, but thus far no luck.  I do get a list of the files/subdirectories (on screen) but if I try to "extract" any data all I get is a "blank".  I've not found any information on fixing a corrupt segment, but hope that one is available somewhere.  If you have any suggestions, I would deeply appreciate the help!

Dave

Electek

Depending on the version of Ghost you use you might need slightly different instructions but in general you can try the following.

Ghost only looks one segment ahead so you can try restoring as many segments as you have to any additional hard disk. At some point ghost will halt and complain. At this point you should be able to run chkdsk on just restored volume to fix up any remaining file and volume problems. You cannot recover all the data but this way you can at least recover some of the files.

Hope this helps.

Hi Eugene:

Again thanks for the response, I replied to the other post as well, but to keep the subjects intact...

I fear that it seems to be the 1st additional segment that is having a problem so as best I can tell nothing is being viewed (Ghost Explorer).  An odd thing did happen yesterday as I have a copy on my "Server" and was able to view it, but not the one on the local drive.  When I copy the Server's files across, they somehow seem to get corrupted, so not exactly sure what to do.  I've not had this problem before with either this or other Ghost images (at least where they've been created successfully).  Could it be my Ghost 2003 installation?  Not really sure what is going on - I did download the newest trial version.  If I install that version as a test, will it modify any of my images?

Thanks again for the replies, I really appreciate the response.

Dave

Electek

So long as you have the first GHO intact you can start image restoration. If there are any GHS that follow that are missing or corrupt then ghost will choke but at leats you'll get to that point and possibly data you are looking for will be restored.

We are looking at whether it could be possible to provide an option to ghost to do "scan on restore". Of course this would mean that ghost could potentially restore any broken archive by continuosly searching thru all the data and it wil take ages to complete - however this is an option we are considering for the future. At the moment ghost simply looks for own tags on spans and it will fail eventually when it finds none.

Hope this helps.