Ghosting Vista Drives

[glenglenn]

Hi Guys,

I guess out here in the hinterlands it takes a while to get around to it, but I finally had my first experience at ghosting a &%$#@*&^!!! Vista, hard drive, or maybe I should say using Symantec's &%$#@!! new Ghost program (with Symantec software, you inevitably have some error message and some elegant solution they want you to run instead of them fixing their &^%$#!! problem software).

Anyway, I downloaded their trial version of Ghost Solution 2.5 and made a boot CD with Windows PE to start the computer with, and ran the ghost program (up to now, I've been using 2003 with all OS up to XP, reliable and trustworthy). When I ran Ghost, it reported, right away mind you, not after looking at a good deal, or any, of the drive, that "bad blocks were encountered on read". Now normally, I would suspect the drive itself, but evidently, upon googling this, it could be a problem with the new Ghost program and the way it accesses a drive, and that you can edit the ghost executable with a switch or two to force it to access the drive in other ways. I told ghost to ignore the "bad blocks" and finished out creating the drive image. So now, I don't really know if there are problems with the hard drive, like I would normally suspect (the factory recovery from the recovery partition, wherein formatting would mark any bad sectors and install Windows on only good ones, seems to be going quite nicely), or if there are different versions of ghost with different ways of accessing the drives with different switches on the executable built in, and that this is the actual problem. Update: Spoke too soon, the format went OK, but the recovery of data is stuck at 30% now for the last 15 minutes, so that may indicate a problem with the data/hard drive at the source image file, or the destination user partition.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I just ordered an OEM disk of Ghost Solutions 2.0, just to able to image &%$#@!!! Vista, drives...