Restoring Your Operating System Partition
with Norton Ghost 2003

If you haven't already done a backup, please click HERE to learn how to do one!

If you haven't got a copy of Norton Ghost 2003, you can find one very inexpensively by looking online. The best price I've found is at http://www.softwareoutlet.com and to get to the produt we're talking about now, just click Here!

1) First things first, we need to run the program itself, from within Windoze, you'll normally find it located here:

[START]/Programs/Norton Ghost 2003/Norton Ghost

Once you run the program, you'll be presented with Ghost's main options screen below:

Ghost Main Options Screen

Here, you simply click on "Restore" to begin the backup restoration process! Once clicked, you will then see the Restore Wizard Screen, as it appears below:

Ghost Restore Wizard Notification Screen

This screen serves to inform you that you are about to launch into a Backup Restoration, and all you need to do here is to click "Next" to continue.

You will now be presented with the "Select Image" screen. This is where you choose which particular backup image you wish to restore your hard drive or partition from.

Backup Image Selection Screen

Here is where you select the backup that you've created earlier to restore your system with.

All you need to do here is to click on the "Browse..." button, navigate your way to your "Hard Drive Backups" directory on whatever drive you placed it into, select the backup, and you're ready to restore your system to fully-functional glory once again! Clicking on the "Browse..." button will present you with the following Windoze dialog box:

Backup Image Selection Dialog

Here, we see a directory on the hard drive called "!_HD_BACKUPS_!". That seems as good a place as any to look for our backup images, so we'll double-click on that to see what's in there. ;)

Backup Directory Selected

Here, you can simply double-click the directory in question, or click "Open" to navigate into the directory so that you can choose the specific backup you wish to restore your hard drive or partition with.

Inside the Backup Storage Directory...

Here you need to decide which backup you wish to restore. I've chosen the last backup in the series, as it is the most current backup. There may be a time when you realize that something you installed earlier may have been the source of whatever problem(s) you are having with your computer today, so you might wish to choose an earlier backup to restore from, but for the moment, the most recent backup serves our purposes well enough. Clicking on the backup image and pressing the "Open" button (or double-clicking the image file) will then present you with the following information about the selected backup image:

Selected Image Information Screen

Here you are presented with any information you may have entered for your backup when you created it. Now you can see why it could be an important thing to put in a line or two to explain the backup's purpose! ;)

Click on the "Next" button to continue...

Now that we've selected the image we wish to restore, we've got to tell Ghost what hard drive and/or partition we want it to restore to.

Source & Destination Selection Screen

The system knows which backup you're ready to restore from, but now you need to tell it where to write the data that it's going to restore!

In the left panel, you see the "Source Image" which is just another way to say "Backup that we're restoring from", but you'll notice that both the image and the data are highlighted, and everything in the "Destination" panel is "ghosted" and can not be selected. This can be remedied quickly by clicking on the "Data Portion" of the image file in the "Source Image" panel. Your screen will change to appear like this:

Source Data Selected & Destination Paths are selectable

Now that Ghost knows for sure exactly what you want to restore, you only need to tell it where to write the data!

Since we're trying to restore our cmputer to a functional state, and we've selected our Operating System Partition backup image, we will want to restore that image to "System (C:)", and of course, that's what we need to click on here, followed by another click on the "Next" button, which brings up te following screen:

Overwrite Windows Check Screen

Now sometimes you might have accidentally selected your operating system partion, and since restoring a data backup to the operating system partion would render your system useless (ie: it'd have a spare copy of your data partition, but no Operating System to boot with or software to run!!!) this is a check to be absolutely sure that you DO want to overwrite your Operating System Partition. If you do NOT want to do this, or have even the slightest fear that you MAY have selected the wrong hard drive partition, click "Cancel" and STOP RIGHT NOW! You can always go through the process again, only paying a little more attention next time. ;)

Just to be absolutely clear here, if you DO want to restore your operating system partition to a prior state, you MUST click the "Overwrite Windows" checkbox as it shows below before Ghost will allow the Backup Restoration process to continue:

"Overwrite Windows" checkbox has been checked!

One last check!

Advanced Settings Option Screen

Here, you may choose additional "Advanced Options" with which to restore your backup image, or simply bypass this screen by clicking "Next". Most people don't need to change anything to restore a backup, so it's usually quite safe to bypass this screen on most restoration runs. Clicking "Next" will provide you with this screen:

Restore Task Summary Screen

This screen gives you a little more information about what Backup Image you are restoring from, and where the Target that data will be unpacked will be written. It also shows you any "Advanced Settings" that may have been selected and saved by default, or those which you may have just added in the "Advanced Settings" selection screen when it was presented to you above.

NOTE: My preferred "Command line options" are -ghostoncd and -cns

-ghostoncd writes a copy og the Ghost 2003 executable on the first CD or DVD in a backup set, so that even if you can't boot your system, you can still restore the backup, provided you've got a boot floppy!

-cns stands for "Compatible Naming System" and this prevents successive backups from overwriting eachother.

Neither of those options really matter here, as we're working on a RESTORATION, so there's nothing to overwrite but a bad hard drive partition which needs to be sent back in time to a day when it worked!

To do that, all we need to do is to click "Run Now"...but wait!!! Now we see this:

LAST CHANCE TO ABORT Dialog

This is your ABSOLUTELY LAST CHANCE to change your mind about restoring your backup! If you changed your mind and would rather hack around at your computer more to try and fix the problem(s), now is the time to click "Cancel". If you're REALLY SURE that you want to restore the backup image now, click "OK" and your system will reboot, restore your data/files, and on completion of the restoration process, it will reboot again...only this time, it'll be just like it was on the very day you did the backup that you've just restored your system from!

If you haven't yet done a backup, perhaps all of this might be a little foreign to you, so you'd be better off to click on "INTRODUCTION" or "PARTITION BACKUP" below so you'll understand what I'm talking about. ;)

INTRODUCTION and PARTITION BACKUP

(Please click the operation above that interests you for a quick walk-through.)