This message is to all Norton Ghost users or those thinking of buying or upgrading. In a word DON'T. I recently went from Ghost 9.0 to Ghost 10.0 and it is riddled with bugs and problems which has almost wrecked my system. Add to this the absolutely shockingly awful "support" from Symantec and I am left considering a conversation with my solicitor!

Specifically -

1. SATA drives are clearly a problem when in the recovery mode. Neither of my 2 Maxtor SATA drives appear in the recovery mode which is kinda important since that's where my recovery images are stored!

2. Even standard IDE drives also are a problem in Recovery mode. My bog standard 120GB IDE Maxtor is not displayed in this mode.

3. Software based RAID is NOT supported. I tested Ghost 10.0 on my backup PC which has an NVIDIA RAID built on the MB. I can't get the recovery mode to boot properly even when adding the NVIDIA to the boot process from a floppy drive.

Needless to say I have "tried" to get help from Symantec Support. I might as well have asked my cat for help. The first "technician" told me that I was using non supported drivers for my SATA drives which is absolute nonsence - all the drivers identified in Control panel for the Drives are present on the recovery disk. Oh and also, apparently, for certain IDE drives one has to load drivers for those in recovery mode since they are not supported. What a load of old b%^&*cks!

I then made the mistake of using logic to dismiss this diagnosis. "So why in Ghost 9.0 then do my exotic SATA and highly exotic IDE drive appear in recovery mode". Answer - "Ghost 10 has an improved native driver support than Ghost 9.0 which is why your drives are not appearing"

Ugghh???????? ???

Trying to contain my annoyance, I dully ran their partition complier and emailed to them. No response. Called them again and then spoke with another space cadet adamant that its my system. Sent the partition info AGAIN - no response.

So in summary, if you are one of those strange misfits like me who are clearly at the "very edge" of the latest drive hardware technology then DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES put Norton Ghost 10 on your system. On a positive note, I tried Acronis True Image v9.0 and ALL my drives show up quite happily in recovery mode without the need for floppy drive loads, incantations or whatever (even my highly exotic 120GB IDE drive - wow!). Also my NVIDIA RAID on my other PC works just fine with True Image v9.0.

Oh, on a final thought. Norton's Recovery disk is not upgraded - you get it with your retail pack or download the image if you buy softcopy of the web. The Acronis recovery disk on the other hand is created by the Installed Windows software which means that Acronis can add more support for new drives and you can create upgraded Recovery disks. A cynic might suggest that Symantec have deliberately chosen this configuration so that you have to upgrade in order to have the latest drive technology supported??? No surely not.

Well done Acronis

A note to Symantec - you may kindly take your buggy, badly designed products and your pathetic support and shove them where the sun don't shine - permanently.

The root of the problem is that the old ghost relied on external drivers for a SCSI type devices, where as the new ghost has better native support and does away with the drivers. This improves the program itself, but subtracts from the overall support. Intelligent move huh.

Symantic have a wonderful history of buying a well designed and documented product, pumping god knows how much money into it and turning it into a bloated buggy piece of crap. Don't get me started.

Norton Antivirus is the only Norton product worth it's boot laces. All the rest are shoddy at best and dangerous at worst.

Right on and well said!

What gets to me most is the way they treat you as an idiot and that its always "your" system or "your" disk drive / configuration etc etc. instead of admiting that its THEIR software which is at fault.

When are they going to learn that the most important thing from a User persepctive is "Will it work". They seemed to have cracked it in V9.0 with seemingly no major compatibiloty issues with the current drive technology and it fixed all the problems with v7.0 - v8.0 with RAID's SATA's etc . Now its a flawed product because they have tried to get too clever. :