Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

The only reason I gave Ghost 14 four stars is because during the backup screens you do not see all the partitions on your hard drive in the default configuration. A novice user would not know that other hidden partitions exist on their computer and would probably not backup them. If the purpose of Ghost 14 is to backup an entire computer then the user should see all partitions that exist on their hard disks as the default configuration. Let the user hide any partition as an option since I know hidden partitions are important too. If your hard disk fails you do want everything back including the hidden partitions. In my opinion the menu configurations of Ghost 14 are more complicated than what it needs to be for the average user. Gone are the days of Ghost 2003 when Symantec would allow a home user to backup all his computers at home with a single copy of Ghost. Now we must all purchase one license of Ghost per PC. The only Reason I purchased Ghost 14 was because DELL messed up their bios on my new laptop so Ghost 2003 would not work with their USB ports. Ghost 2003 would allow you to create your own boot CD disks if you knew how to create boot CD disks with Nero and knew how to modify batch files. You were able to boot Ghost from a CD and backup your entire computer to an external/internal drive or burn a CD or DVD backup. Ghost 2003 is still able to backup all my other computers with Windows Vista and Windows XP (32bit and 64bit versions). The Ghost 14 bootable CD only restores images and does not have any backup software available so it behaves like a rescue CD. All backups in Ghosts 14 are conveniently done when logged in to a Windows XP or Windows Vista account unlike Ghost 2003 which requires you to use a bootable CD, USB Drive, or floppy disks.

After my experience with Ghost v 3.0, I should have known better, but I figured by 14.0 they would have gotten it right. My laptop drops its wireless Internet connection for a few seconds every 15 or 20 minutes - an unsolved problem for many users as a result of yet another piece of crap from Dell. Genie 8.0 does the same thing, but runs the second time. Plus its free. Because Im backing up to a network drive, Ghost just issues an error message and dies. Theres absolutely no tolerance for even a second or two of interruption to the drive connection. So now Im trying to back up using a direct hard-wire connection to the router. It goes along fine, then suddenly it ejects the Ghost disk and says it cant write to it. Huh? Why would it try to write to the Ghost CD? It says insert writeable media. So I take out the Ghost disk and put in a blank. It says writing tracks. Then it ejects the disk with an error and dumprep locks up the cpu for 20 minutes. I put it back in and it sits there for a few hours. Finally I cancel. The disk has nothing on it, but its ruined and cant be rerecorded. I try again. Same thing.

I have been using Ghost for years, back to the good old day when it was PowerQuest. Though there are some other application that are much stronger and have more functionality then Ghost. Symantec has let Partition Magic go by the way side, as after XP it not longer is useable. Do your research before purchasing it.

All the review said this was a easy to use product. After installation it failed to back my C: drive as promised in the literature. I had to GOOGLE for a solution. And finally after doing 7 CHECKDSK command it finally work.

I consider myself has having average computer skills. In the early 90s I used to regard an afternoon chasing an IRQ conflict as good fun. Half the fun of new peripheral was the weekend spent getting it to play nice with Windows 3.11. But there comes a point--- I installed Norton Ghost 14 (I had in the past used Non-Symantic ghost to transfer a drive image and an earlier version-- much earlier version-- of Norton Ghost to back up a work computer-- I think I probably still have a 25 CD backup set somewhere although the computer is long gone. Recently however, I have been backing up the essential files on my computers to a partition on a 500 GB hard drive, scheduled to synchronize in the wee hours of the morning. However, I have always been a belt and suspenders sort of person when it comes to my data. When I first installed Ghost it let me know at once that I had a problem with my RAM. Instead of the 518 MB I had last week, it detected 448 MB. A quick check of my system shows that Ghost was correct although there apparently is a bug that can cause the RAM to show less. I think that probably having the minum RAM necessary is a bad idea. It allowed me to complete the install but warned me that certain resources may not work due to the RAM issue. I then ran the driver validation and discovered that two of my drivers were not available in the Symantic, one was a USB Linksys Wireless-G USB network adapter. The second was a Packet Scheduler Miniport. Neither essential to getting a computer up and running after a disaster so I save the log as text file to deal with later. Im not going through all of the various parts of the program because there are a lot of features, but I would urge everyone who buys this to check the Read.me file for known bugs and conflicts. UPDATE: Had I only known then what I know now-- some weeks and one hard drive format later I have to say that I think I was too sanguine about this program. My computer began to act up with mysterious slow downs and restarts. I run pretty good antivirus, spyware and malware protection , in addition to using Firefox with No Script (Java, Active X, and Flash off). However, I began to worry that something might have got through and infected my machine, so I took it for a look-see. They couldnt figure it out-- or didnt want to spend much time figuring it out so I just had them reformat my harddrive-- just shoot me next time I let someone else work on my computer. Luckily I had my second back up so I was able to save most of my important files because Norton Ghost 14.0 sure didnt restore.

Product as described received quickly

WARNING to anyone thinking about buying this product! Please understand that you will not be buying this product only RENTING it. If you do not renew every year the product stops working....COMPLETELY! Im not just talking about updates, etc. It actually tells you that it has stopped working and it wont work unless you renew. I have just wasted more than 2 hours with Nortons online tech support. This is the case with ALL Norton products and I am quoting the tech.

I bought Norton Ghost 14 to use to migrate my Thinkpad T60 to a larger hard drive. I spent all day trying, only to learn that this product wont do that! I ended up just downloading a free product, HDClone, and it worked perfectly. If you want to do routine backups, you can buy Ghost. If you need to clone a hard-drive with hidden partitions, look elsewhere.

Great product, does what it is supposed to do, once it is installed, but the installation!!! Once I found the link that allowed their tech to figure out what was wrong, and that took me some doing, after I had tried to install it a couple of times, including using the Norton Utility that is supposed to clean out old Norton installations, it took the tech about an hour to figure out what the problems were and fix them. He was excellent, superb, obvioiusly in South Asia, and you have to be willing to allow them to take over your computer, but why was it so difficult (I run Windows XP on AMD Athlon) to install, and so hard to find the on line tech support link?

After wasting two days trying to copy my old hard drive to a new hard drive, I gave up using this tool for that purpose. I think the problem was the new HD was formatted incorrectly to be a bootable drive. The software has a Copy Master Boot Record option, but it never made the drive bootable. This software never tells you the result will not be bootable. Even if it did there is no option to repartition the HD with either Ghost or plain XP options. If you want to migrate your primary HD to a new larger HD, use Acronis Migrate Easy since it is half the price and has the ability to adjust your partitions to be bootable. I think Norton wants this to be purely backup software. As a backup software its buggy. If you have SQL Server installed, you probably run into the COM Surrogate error. I hate the way the software is presumptuous. I didnt need a LiveUpdate in the control panel. Ghost gives you a startup tray app that scans HDs on startup. This slows up the bootup and I dont see how you can turn it off. Since backup software comes with Windows not sure this is worth $70.