Norton Ghost 9.0 [OLD VERSION]

by Symantec

Product Features

• Advanced backup and recovery for the PC
• Create backup images without restarting Windows
• Incremental backups save time and disk space
• Schedule backups to run automatically
• Includes Norton Ghost 2003 for extended backups

Product Details

Product Manual [1.22mb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B0002RQ5AU
• Item model number: 10281772
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 2, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,757 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #4 in Software > Utilities > Memory Management
  • #9 in Software > Utilities > Partitions
  • #60 in Software > Utilities > Backup

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Symantec’s Norton Ghost 9.0 provides advanced backup and recovery for your PC. Protect your data by making a backup of your hard drive’s contents--without restarting Windows. Incremental backups save you time and disk space. You can even schedule backups to run automatically. Quickly restore individual files, selected folders, or the entire hard drive.

Features:

• New! "Hot imaging" lets you create backup images without restarting Windows. *
• New! Incremental backup updates save time and disk space.*
• New! Scheduled backups automatically keep your backup image up to date.*
• Backs up everything on a hard drive or partition.
• Works with a wide range of hard drives and removable media, including CDR/RW and DVD+-R/RW drives, USB and FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices, and Iomega Zip and Jaz drives.
• Restores data from images created with PowerQuest Drive Image 7.0 and previous versions of Norton Ghost.*
• Symantec Recovery Disk lets you restore data from a backup image even when the computer can’t start up into Windows.
• LiveUpdate keeps Norton Ghost updated automatically over the Internet.
• Norton Ghost 2003 is included to back up and restore data to: Windows 9x, Me, NT; Linux; and DOS systems.

*This feature is not available with Norton Ghost 2003.

Product Description

Provides advanced backup and recovery for your PC. Protect your data by making a backup of the contents of your hard drive - without restarting Windows. Incremental backups save you time and disk space.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

129 of 135 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally!! Somebody got it right., September 7, 2004

By 

P. Clark (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Norton Ghost 9.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

After experimenting with Ghost version 9.0, I can report that Symantec has produced a slick piece of software now that PowerQuest's DriveImage capabilities have been fully integrated into the feature set. Note that Version 9.0 works only on XP and 2000 systems.

For my home machine, I'm using a spare IDE drive to store the backup images. I have set up a regular schedule which will automatically do a full baseline backup once per month, with weekly incremental saves. The backup is performed at the rate of about 1 GB per minute on an Intel 3.20 GHz machine, with compression set to the standard parameter of 40%. I set a limit of 3 baseline images so that the backup drive will never run out of room.

Backup jobs are run within Windows so there is no need to boot to DOS. Backups can also be transmitted to a network server or written directly to CD or DVD devices.

Ghost includes a nifty utility which can open a backup image so that you can pull out a specific file for restoration. Following a catastrophic failure, you can boot from the Ghost software CD into recovery mode and very easily restore an entire drive including the MBR, making the disk ready to boot.

Ghost will also copy a drive while running under Windows. I successfully copied my C-drive, but XP would not boot the copy without permission from Microsoft.

Backups using removable media (i.e. CD or DVD) must be started manually. Backups to a hard drive or a network server can be scheduled for automatic operation. Just leave the PC on at night and it's all taken care of. Ghost will even send notification via email that the backup was completed.

88 of 96 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars If you really really need help, you won't get it!, December 10, 2004

By 

Donald Chen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Norton Ghost 9.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I have been using Symantec products for few years and in general I don't have many complains. For most time, I can live with or work around the problems here or there. You know, I am a computer programmer.
But this time, I am really really disappointed. I used the Ghost 9.0 and had one of my W2K disk images backed up in a network drive, for that part, it went smoothly. It just happened that one of my hard drives crashed and I need to restore the image back to a new hard drive. Started with Symantec Recovery Disk (it came with Systemworks Premier that included the GS 9.0) from CD-Rom, network service started cool. I used the network drive mapping utility to locate my backed up image. Boy, I was happy, but a little bit too early. When I got to the recovery step, it said: Error EBAB0003, This Feature is not implemented. Excuse me, that's not what the user's guide says. There were few options in that screen you can change, but no matter what, sorry, that feature was always not implemented.
The so-called free tech support a joke, basically you go to their web page and there are few useless articles for you to read. If you are buying, make sure you understand you will need to pay near $30 per incident for phone support.
What I am going to try next is to find a way to get the image file to another hard drive and put it in to the same pc to see if I can recover it from there. Please don't tell me this feature is also not implemented.
One another thing I was sold to this is the new incremental backup feature. I hope it is implemented when you want to restore your files.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars TERRIBLE SUPPORT -- took a week to get it to work!, December 21, 2004

By 

malchien (San Luis Obispo, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Norton Ghost 9.0 [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

I'm an advaced user of disk imaging software. Drive Image 5 was great, but it didn't backup to DVDs, so I purchased Norton Ghost. Symantec doesn't tell you in the manual, but you can't just install the program under XP SP2. You have to alter your Boot.ini file first. I did this, but Ghost 9.0 didn't even show an option for backing up to a DVD drive, this despite my drive being listed on Symantec's site as being supported by Ghost. Symantec's free support amounts to a few FAQ articles on thier web site that are worthless.

After a long an painful search, I found an option to e-mail technical support on Symantec's web site. After sending repeated e-mails, I got a response a week later refering me to a "Knowledge Base" article about CD/DVD drives needing new config files to work with Ghost. THIS ARTICLE IS NOT EVEN LISTED IN SYMANTEC'S FAQ FOR GHOST! I tried to search for the articl but it's not there. After downloading the drivers, it solved the problem, only after a week of frustration.

{Update 12/2008) Well, I've been using Norton Ghost for a few years now, and it's been working like a champ. I've done at least 10 restores of my c: drive without any problems. Once I got it to work, it worked great.