[Prozactive]

Recently there has been a lot of excellent technical discussions about the limitations of various utility programs (FDISK, FORMAT, SCANDISK, Norton Disk Doctor, etc.) vs. today's increasingly large hard drives.

I was wondering if anyone knows anything about similar limitations of Norton Ghost 2003 (a DOS program)? Web searches and anecdotal reports indicate problems with HDDs in the 1 TB to 1.5 TB range with "divide overflow" errors often mentioned, but I have not seen anything definitive. I personally do not have a HDD in this size range to test and experiment around with, but recently I helped a friend make a Ghost image backup to his new 1 TB NTFS-formatted external HDD. I had a lot of difficulty getting various DOS USB drivers to recognize the large HDD (I believe I did get some "divide overflow" errors), but once I managed to do so, Ghost 2003 did not have any problems writing the image to the drive. Of course the new HDD was empty so the image was written well below any "hard size limit". It would be very useful to know the maximum size limit for Ghost 2003, and steps one could take (repartitioning, etc.) to compensate. Thanks for any information on this topic!

[Ed999]

I wonder if Norton Ghost 2003 for DOS is truly a viable subject for this topic?

The program is notorious for creating corrupt image files, due to faulty compression (although it's possibly okay for uncompressed disk-to-disk direct cloning). Users typically run into real problems with image files created by it.

IMHO, encouraging the use of the program is unwise. There always seem to be those who can't grasp the distinction between its compressed and uncompressed options, or who just don't think to test their image backups before they need to rely on restoring them!

Norton's Ghost for DOS v8.3, for instance, does not have this fault. Norton Ghost 2003 might be a more sophisticated product - well, alright, it is - but it's just not as reliable.

Sorry this is somewhat off-topic. But I get nervous when I come across this particular program. At the very least, anyone reading this topic needs to be aware of the risks that are involved in using Norton Ghost 2003.

[Prozactive]

I must say I'm shocked ("surprised" is too mild a word) to hear about *any* problems with Ghost. This is definitely the first time I've seen a problem reported. I've personally used Ghost 2003 for years and Ghost 6.0 for several years before that, successfully restoring dozens of images without any problems whatsoever. It's saved my bacon countless times, and I consider it one of the most valuable programs I own. BTW I always use fast compression and save the images to another HDD, and I always run an integrity check on the image afterwards just to be safe. I've never had an image fail its integrity check either.

I have no experience directly burning an image to optical media, as I don't trust or like that method at all. I can imagine problems cropping up from doing so. I also have never used versions of Ghost from 9.0 onward. I understand they're based on PowerQuest's DriveImage and are completely different "under the hood" from previous versions.

Still hoping to hear technical feedback from the MSFN community on Ghost 2003 HDD size limitations...

[dencorso]

My experience with Ghost 2003, like Prozactive's is that it's the best cloning program ever.
It's very reliable. As far as I know, there's no limitation to the size of the destination partition used, except those imposed by the host OS, because the access for writing the image is done through the OS. Ghost only accesses the disk directly to acquire the image and to redeploy it. In any case, for DOS and Win 9x/ME, this means we can be sure the partition one saves the image to can certainly be as big as 1 GB (= 931.5 GiB), if not more. The anecdotal partition size limit for image acquisition is also 1 GB (= 931.5 GiB), if not more, too.
BTW, GHOST.EXE for DOS from Norton Ghost 2003 is v. 7.6.0.793 (with cdrlib=3.1.25), when fully up to date... This means that Ed999's comments make little sense, since GHOST.EXE for DOS v. 8.3.0.1355 1335 (with cdrlib=3.1.31) is the most up to date version of the GHOST.EXE that comes with the SYMANTEC GHOST SOLUTION SUITE 1.1 (initially released in 2005), and hence is a later (and even better) version of Ghost.
It took me some time to find it in my bookmarks, but there is this post at Radified, by Dan Godell, that you may find interesting. BTW, Radified is the place to go when one has Ghost in mind, although, of course, you're welcome to post about it here, too.

[Prozactive]

Thank you dencorso for your response. BTW I assume you meant 1 TB as the maximum HDD size limit. Since my initial post, I've come across more information that strongly suggests that 1 TiB is the maximum destination HDD size limit for Ghost 2003. It also appears that this is a hard disk not partition size limit, much like the 137 GB 48-bit LBA limit. You bring up a good point - I don't know what the maximum source HDD size limit would be. That would be interesting to test and experiment around with.

Yes I also noted the erroneous info cited about Ghost 2003 vs. the more recent and updated Ghost 8.3 (as part of Ghost Solution Suite 1.1). However, I'm not familiar with the cdrlib parameter you mentioned. What exactly is that?

EDIT: I just noticed your reference to Dan Goodell's post on Radified forums. You must've edited your initial reply as I don't recall seeing that. Thanks, and yes that's exactly where I got the technical information about 1 TiB being the likely size limit. (I'm also a member of that forum BTW and did post a similar inquiry.)

This post has been edited by Prozactive: 01 April 2010 - 11:35 PM

[rloew]

The limit for Hard Disk size is 2TiB unless you are using a controller that has a poorly designed BIOS and/or Driver. A Patched ESDI_506.PDR driver will handle the full 2TiB.

The Maximum Partition Size, in Windows 9X, is 1TiB due to a bug in the FileSystem Driver. I have written a Patch that allows 2TiB Partitions to be used.

DOS can handle 2TiB Partitions.

[dencorso]

@Prozactive: Yes, I edited that post and added the info, but forgot to enable the "Edited by" field, which is not mandatory and is off by default for smods.

Here's some additional info:

(a) here's a noteworthy Symantec KB article (which however refers to Ghost v. 11.5.0.x).

(b)for those interested in understanding the version history of Ghost (and the evolution of the program), there is a great entry in the Wikipedia about it: Ghost and this other Symantec KB article: Updates to Norton Ghost 2003

©more about RLoew's 1 TiB patch...

dencorso, on 24 September 2009 - 10:54 AM, said:

[...] last year, RLoew found out that the VFAT.VxD (which is Win 9x/ME's protected mode filesystem driver) has a flaw that efectively prevents it from working correctly above 1 TiB (and developed a patch to resolve this issue, see the section "PRERELEASE AND BETA SOFTWARE" of RLoew's Homepage). So, to make short a long story, the effective limit of FAT-32, when used under Win 9x/ME is 1 TiB, unless you patch VFAT.VxD. Incidentally, RLoew has other patches relevant here, that permit one to go up to the 8 TiB, but then one will be using a non-standard FAT-32.

rloew, on 24 September 2009 - 11:10 PM, said:

The 1 TiB limit is due to a flaw in VFAT.VXD that may or may not appear depending upon the alignment of clusters and the page sized blocks (4KiB) used for I/O. The problem generally appears as a system freeze when trying to read directories located above the 1TiB boundary. Fortunately, corruption does not appear to occur. The Patch corrects the code in VFAT.VXD. No other files are modified.

Note: The 1TiB limit applies to the size of a Partition, not the total size of a Drive.

[skwjohn]

Hi all, im not sure im i out of topic to reply this at here. All the while im using norton ghost 2003 DOS at win9x and winXP untill i buy new harddisk SATA 500GB. with this 500GB HDD, the bootable ghost diskket unable to dectect the harddisk. I had try to make partition to both drive 250GB, but still unable to dectect. My previous harddisk is IDE 350GB, the ghost diskket working perfectly. so i guess the norton ghost 2003 harddisk limitation is below 500GB?? I would love to know if there have a solution for the ghost 2003 DOS version, can use for the harddisk 500GB and above. Thanks for reading.

[Prozactive]

You pulled this thread out of the dusty vaults! Well that's a long complex topic that's been extensively discussed both in this forum and in Radified forums, but off the top of my head, it's been fairly well established anecdotally that Norton Ghost 2003 has around a 1 TiB maximum HDD size limit. There are a lot of technical factors and caveats that go into that, much too long to concisely explain here. Your best bet is to search this forum and Radified forums for this topic. But yes, 500 GB should be well within the capability of Norton Ghost 2003. I strongly suspect your issue has to do with the fact that it's a SATA HDD, something I don't have any experience with. You obviously need to make sure your DOS drivers are compatible with SATA HDDs, and I don't know if the native Iomega drivers supplied with Ghost 2003 are compatible.

This post has been edited by Prozactive: 07 December 2011 - 02:07 PM

[dencorso]

If the BIOS can detect the drive correctly and it's <= 1 TB, Ghost 2003 will work with it all right. Try all possibilities offered by the BIOS (IDE mode if it exists,etc.).

[jds]

dencorso, on 30 March 2010 - 02:49 PM, said:

GHOST.EXE for DOS v. 8.3.0.1355 1335 (with cdrlib=3.1.31) is the most up to date version of the GHOST.EXE that comes with the SYMANTEC GHOST SOLUTION SUITE 1.1 (initially released in 2005)

Hmmm ... Any idea how to update to version 8.3.0.1335? I've gone through Live Update (two or three iterations were required) and this brought Ghost 8.3 to version 8.3.0.1331 only.

@Prozactive : According to some comments on the web, "cdrlib" = CD Rom Library (settings for various CD ROM drives).

Joe.

[dencorso]

It's a typo. The correct version is 8.3.0.1355, downloadable from this page. Me and my typos!

[jds]

dencorso, on 08 December 2011 - 09:36 AM, said:

It's a typo. The correct version is 8.3.0.1355, downloadable from this page. Me and my typos!

Thanks, Den!!!

Joe.

[jds]

I recently encountered an issue with Ghost 8.3, may also affect Ghost 2003 (since this is older) :

I was trying to save a partition image from a WDC WD64AA version 82.10A82 hard drive, and was getting random "15079 (size less than reported)" errors. Searching for solutions on the 'net all said to run 'scandisk' or similar tools to correct for disk corruptions. However, all tools I could find, reported nothing wrong with the disk data structure.

By trial and error, I found the solution was to use the "-FNI" command line option, which disables Direct IDE Access by Ghost.

BTW, the target drive to save the image was a USB drive. Also, the other hard drives on the same machine did not exhibit this random 15079 error when backing up their partitions, just the WDC drive. [Edit: I also should mention, in case it's relevant, the WDC drive was on the secondary IDE port, whereas the other drives were on the primary IDE port.]

Joe.

This post has been edited by jds: 16 March 2012 - 06:34 PM

[Prozactive]

@jds:
That is indeed strange. In all the years I've used Ghost I've never had to use the -FNI switch. My first guess was that you have one of those new Advanced Format HDDs but a quick search showed that on the contrary, you have an older WDC Caviar HDD. It would be interesting to see if switching the HDD to the primary IDE port makes any difference. I also wonder if there's some sort of quirky disk geometry setup misconfiguration or related type thing going on. Web searches on the -FNI switch show that it's often associated with SATA HDDs but I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply in this case.

[jds]

Prozactive, on 20 March 2012 - 11:15 AM, said:

@jds:
That is indeed strange. In all the years I've used Ghost I've never had to use the -FNI switch. My first guess was that you have one of those new Advanced Format HDDs but a quick search showed that on the contrary, you have an older WDC Caviar HDD. It would be interesting to see if switching the HDD to the primary IDE port makes any difference. I also wonder if there's some sort of quirky disk geometry setup misconfiguration or related type thing going on. Web searches on the -FNI switch show that it's often associated with SATA HDDs but I'm pretty sure that doesn't apply in this case.

Well, there's no disk geometry misconfiguration, as the 15079 errors occurred randomly during each attempt at saving a partition image. In other words, different files were flagged as having a smaller size than reported, each time an attempt was made. Also, the drive tested fine with every test utility I could find and performed/behaved perfectly normally.

Anyway, I've now substituted a slightly larger drive for the WDC, in the same secondary master position. It doesn't exhibit any 15079 errors, random or otherwise. So it seems this issue was some obscure compatibility issue between Ghost and this particular drive. So if you ever encounter similar random "15079 (size less than reported)" errors, and you don't find any problems with the drive, the solution is the "-FNI" command line switch.

Joe.

This post has been edited by jds: 23 March 2012 - 07:56 AM