Restoring a Hard Drive Image using Norton Ghost

In the previous tutorial, we created an exact image of a hard drive on a separate external drive. For the sake of this tutorial, lets say Windows 7 or Vista got really confused about something and the fastest way to fix it is to restore the image of the Operating System when it was healthy. This is a review of the Norton Ghost hard drive restore process.

Open up Norton Ghost 15.0 to get to this screen. I want to recover my computer so I clicked on Recover My Computer.

This is good. The program found where the image is stored. I clicked Recover Now.

This next screen tells me exactly what Norton Ghost is going to do. It looks good to me so I clicked OK.

Then comes the following warning and I say sure you can overwrite my destination drive. It is wounded anyway.

It starts to show a progress indicator, then warns me that it needs to reboot the computer. I figured that would happen seeing as I am working in the drive it needs to restore. I said yes, please continue.

Then I got a surprise. It seems that Norton Ghost cannot control itself on a reboot. I need to use the recovery CD that I have not yet created.

In the Acronis True Image tutorial, the program made me a CD with a couple clicks. I could not find this feature in Norton Ghost 15.0 It made me read the directions and search the Symantec website to find an answer to this dilemma. I downloaded the Ghost program which was about 67 Megabytes but now it seems that I need to download a separate 200 Megabyte ISO file to complete this operation. I didn’t have to do that with Acronis.

I’ll go find that email with the link to the download. Then download the 200 Megabyte ISO file. Then burn the file to a bootable CD. What if my hard drive crashed and the email that I needed for the download was lost with the all the other information? I am quite sure that the restore will go smoothly when I get everything I need for the recovery process ready.

Now that I have downloaded the 200 megabyte file, I can create a Norton Ghost Recovery CD. I went to the file menu and clicked on Create Recovery Disk.

Then the following screen appears welcoming me to the Symantec Recovery Disk Wizard.

I clicked next a couple times to get the Recovery disk to start burning.

Then Norton Ghost told me that the recover disk was created successfully. The Ghost program recommended that I test the CD to make sure it will boot when I need it to. This is a recommended step.

I definitely want to test the recovery CD so I smacked Finish and I was told that a reboot was required. So naturally, I smacked Yes.

The computer booted to the Norton Ghost Recover My Computer Wizard and found my Lacie external hard drive where the Ghost image file is stored with no problems.

I chose the backup file created earlier and proceeded to run the Norton Ghost restore. The restore went uneventful and rebooted the computer to the prior state. The Norton Ghost program completed the task that I set out to perform, albeit with several more steps than I would have liked to perform. After the review of the Norton Ghost imaging process, the program gets a Petabyte on a scale of bytes to Brontobytes.