Sunday, March 11, 2007

For those of you who use Norton Ghost

I backed up a drive with Ghost 2003. I told it to save the disk to an image. I had it overwrite an image that was already present (I save my disk backups to a removable hard drive). I did this so that I could wipe that partition clean and install Windows Vista to try it out for real instead of using it in this silly little VM. (FYI, Vista in a VM is pretty pathetic. Vista running natively isn't a whole lot better - I'm sticking with XP until at LEAST Service Pack 1.) Anyway, Ghost running in real-mode PC-DOS should have overwritten the ghost file on that drive and I'd have a backup of my Linux drive that I could then wipe to install Vista on.

Well, Ghost likes to break backups into 2 gig chunks when storing on NTFS partitions. It may break them into different-sized chunks on different types of partitions, but on this particular NTFS partition, it uses 2 gig chunks. The first one is "whatever.gho" and then the following files are "whatever001.ghs" "whatever002.ghs" etc. I had a file "40gig.gho" that I wanted it to overwrite. There were no 40gigxxx.ghs files in the directory, just the single .gho file.

Now there is 40gig001.ghs and there is no 40gig.gho. I think that when it overwrites an image file, it doesn't properly register the presence of the new file.

Anyway, I'm now running a low-level cluster-by-cluster scan of a 500 gigabyte hard drive to locate a 2 gigabyte file. This scan started 5 hours ago. It'll probably be finished sometime Tuesday.

Moral of the story: if you're going to have Ghost overwrite an image file, just delete the image file yourself first in Windows and tell Ghost to create a new one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work.