Norton Ghost 14.0 [Old Version]

Worked good.

I have enjoyed using Ghost 9, and for some stupid reason, decided to upgrade to 14. It installs a menu system that dumbs down and limits your options. Major problem using if you have an IDE, SCSI, or SATA drives, especially if you installed a Promise type card to get more drive slots. If you need support, all their 800 numbers go through (even during USA daytime) to India or Philippines for support, and they are all following scripted answers. If you try their CHAT they want to have you install software so they can remotely control your desktop in every case, and they still dont fix the problem, or know what is going on. The Gear Software drivers do not work in many cases. If you have other products that use drives/burners like Nero, AnyDVD, etc., you will have conflicts. The price at Nortons website is $70 and it will take more than 10 days if you select the most cost effective method of shipping box. I have wasted almost 5 hours in chat, endless on hold, ridulous telephone routing qeues, and there are no phone numbers to speak with anyone at Symantec in the USA. I will never use another Symantec product again for the rest of my life...and returned this Ghost 14

As an IT professional I can make Norton Ghost perform the tasks I want it to do. I was able to backup my internal 100GB hard drive to my external 500GB drive without too much difficulty. I have never found a product that does a good job with backing up everything, including the OS, and restoring it good as new with little effort, so I wasnt too surprised to see that this product fails in that area too. Personally, I think people are better off using WinZip to backup critical data to an external medium than using something as hard to use as Norton Ghost. Just expect that when your HD dies, youll need to get a new one, format it, load the OS and your apps from source media, then restore your files from the WinZip backup files. This approach is FAR more reliable than supposed one-step solutions like this one.

This product works great for backups and for recovering a PC that is infected by a virus. My PC was recently infected by an Internet Virus. The ones that scams you to pay them so they can remove it. I did have antivirus software running but it did not catch the infection, or my family could have said yes to one of those scam popup. The Virus is smart and very elusive so I ended up having to reload windows and spend the next few days putting everything back together. If it happened to you, then you know what I am talking about. If I had Norton Ghost 14, it would have been an hours task. Purchase this software and immediately create and image of your PC to an external Hard Drive. Keep it up-to-date with the Norton utility, and you never have to worry again. Get the CD version so you can boot from the CD to do the recovery. It works and you will be a hero with your family or business. If your PC is infected, or you loaded software that you should not have, just boot from the CD and re-image the PC to the last time you backed it up. Not to mention it works great for normal back and restore functions.

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.

Had a system drive going out on a PC running Vista Home Premium. Bought a new, larger hard drive to replace the one about to die. Ghost doc describes my exact scenario and gives very simple instructions for using the drive copy feature to copy a system drive onto a new drive, which should subsequently be able to serve as the system drive. Copy was made successfully, but new drive wasnt bootable. Found clues on various forums (though not from Nortons knowledge base, which was about as superficial as the Ghost user guide) regarding how the target drive should be prepared (e.g., formatting, allocation, partitions, etc.) as well as advice to use backup and recover instead of drive copy. In the end, the dying system drive was successfully replaced by backing up the drive to an external hard drive, removing the dying drive, installing the new internal drive, and doing a recovery from the backup onto the new drive (which was formatted and had one single unallocated partition). After performing the recovery, the PC booted to new system drive without a hitch. Ghost worked great once I was properly armed with useful information on how to use it. PC is running well on the new hard drive and I am now using Ghost to do full drive backups on a nightly basis. Software seems good. Just dont rely on the documentation or online knowledge base to tell you how to successfully use it if youre doing anything more complicated than simply scheduling backups.

This is one of the few software apps available that can backup your system AND help you upgrade to a bigger internal hard drive. Usually when attempting to swap out your entire main hard drive (C: drive with the operating system on it) you can only upgrade to an identical size partition, so what is the point?!. Norton Ghost lets you back up your current main C; drive on a separate disk, even a USB drive!, swap out your main drive to a higher performance and bigger drive, and then load your backup to the newly installed hard drive. Norton at this point lets you select if you want to make the new partition use the full new drive size, then it works flawlessly to do what it says. I updated an old laptop with a 32gb drive to a 250gb 5400rpm (PATA) drive and my performance improved 6 fold. Highly recommended. Oh yes, the incremental backups are fast too after you capture the first disk image.

For the most part it does what its suppose to do. Excellent for maintianing a Back-Up. Particular problem encountered was; this Ghost works within Windows, with something running in the background that we could not identify and shut off, it would not make a good copy we could use when copying a worn out hard drive to a new one. It would copy but not run (tried three times). Solution; Had to find a copy of older Ghost 12 which works outside of windows, it made the copy, worked fine copying the primary disc to new hard drive, worked first time. We then reloaded Ghost 14 to use as a backup program for new Backup hard drive, works well. This may be particular problem for what we had running, but Ghost 12 had no problem.

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.

This product has a lot of potential, but when I disconnected my drive one afternoon and Ghost started its daily backup, it spiked my processor and locked up the system. Major bug! I showed the tech support person and he said you must have the drive connected to backup. Of course, but what if the drive isnt connected - crash! Because of this one problem, I decided to try a different backup software.