Hello t33457,
I have the same problem as you describe using Ghost 10 Recovery Environment where the one or more partitions are recognized by the Partition Information tool, but not the Browsers. I’ve read in many other forums that Ghost 10 RE differs from previous version in the way, among other things, drive letters are assigned. This doesn’t seem to be unique to any particular type of drive such as USB or Firewire, but rather the original drive letter assignments, and the quantity of partitions to list a few. It seems as though the partitions and contained data are there, if only drive letters could be assigned things would be wonderful. We’ll I found a way to do just that from with in the Ghost 10 RE, and presto! All my partitions and data became available to do with whatever I needed – read, restore, whatever. This workaround has advantages over some others I’ve read about because it requires no prior coordination/assignment of drive letters before you need to recover data. Below is what I did, I’d be interested in hearing any feedback.
1) First, I have to clarify that I use Ghost 10 as part of the SystemWorks 2006 Premier product. I have been told that the Symantec Recovery Disk that comes with SystemWorks 2006 Premier is identical to the recovery disk of the standalone Ghost 10 product, but I cannot verify that first hand. If someone could try and post their findings it may help.
2) There is an Easter Egg hidden on the Symantec Recovery Disk main window that when clicked launches a console window with a command prompt. Click on the upper left hand side of the window where the N of Norton SystemWorks or Norton Ghost is displayed. You should see the pointer cursor change from the arrow shape to the pointing hand shape.
3) Once at the command prompt, some Windows XP commands are available. Of particular interest in this case is “DiskPart”, but there are others as well including RegEdit that operates on the registry of the Recovery Environment vise the one on your hard drive. DiskPart.exe is a text-mode command interpreter that enables you to manage objects (disks, partitions, or volumes) by using scripts or direct input from a command prompt. See
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d....mspx?mfr=true for more details. Use the “list”, “select”, and “assign” commands to assign drive letters to your letter-less partitions. This is the sequence that worked for me, for example:
Code:
X:\I386\System32> diskpart // starts the tool
DISKPART> list volume // shows all the volumes and their assigned letter
// Look for volumes with no letters
DISKPART> select volume 5 // select one of the volumes without a letter
DISKPART> assign // assigns the next available drive letter to your
// selected volume. Volume 5 in my case.
// Repeat the select, assign as needed for other
// volumes without letters
DISKPART> exit
X:\I386\System32> exit
4) After the console window is closed, proceed with your browsing and restoring. All your drives should be visible now. Note that any letters assigned impact only the recovery environment. Your original letter assignments in your operating windows environment are unaffected.
As an observation, the above procedure does not work from a Custom Recovery Disk Systematic generated for me. They intentionally do not put the full recovery environment on such a recovery disk. To this end, you can accomplish the same affect using RegEdit. You’ll want to add “\DosDevices\x:” (replace x with your favorite unused letter) entries to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. The value of the “\DosDevices\x:” entry should be consistent with a matching \??\Volume{…} entry’s data. It looks like the first 12 bytes will do. Perhaps someone that knows more than I can help fill in the blanks here?