Others say...

"Corrupted my System"
A corrupt file of Norton's corrupted my system including the keyboard driver. Their tech support in India blamed me saying I had installed Ghost incorrectly. What I could possibly have done that would have resulted in corrupt files, he didn't say. He was supposed to upgrade my problem & someone would call me back, but no one ever did.

I tried reinstalling my keyboard driver, but couldn't get rid of Ghost before it had again corrupted my system. Had to reinstall XP. Luckily I had my backup that had been created the day before. It took two days, but I'm back in business and will never again purchase a Norton/Symantec product.

P.S. There seems to be no way to give a product zero stars.

"NOT Compatible with Past Norton Ghost Versions as Claimed"
I made a serious mistake by believing Symantec's claim that Ghost 12 is backwards compatible with previous versions of Norton Ghost. The legendary versions of Ghost up to and including version 8 are NOT supported.

Further, Ghost 12 prevents your installing older versions of Ghost to allow access to files on GHO and GHS extension files. Symantec says I have to buy a very expensive "Enterprise" version of Ghost to recover my past image files.

If you have NEVER used past Ghost versions, this totally different Ghost may work for you. If you archived drives using older Ghost's image process, you are left high and dry by Symantecs abandonment of Legacy Ghost users.

"Don't do it."
Norton Ghost has motivated me to create my first review on Amazon. I grudgingly give it one star because it installed OK, created the first full backup OK, and even created the first incremental backup OK. That was the end of the good news.

A month later I tried to open the ghost console to monitor status, but it crashed with an exception in the .Net Framework. After many weeks, four long chat sessions with Symantec support and at least as many failed attempts to start a chat session, the product continued to crash in .Net Framework. My computer is an up-to-date Vista Business system. Microsoft instructions to check and fix any .NET 2.0 or 3.0 problems are to use "sfc /scannow"; no problems were detected.

Symantec support pointed me at their web page with instructions how to request a refund. Instead of a refund, Symantec ignored references to the web chats and sent a letter with one box checked: "Product was purchased over 60 days ago." True enough, ghost had been purchased from Amazon 81 days earlier.

Three weeks ago I installed Acronis True Image Home and it has worked perfectly.

"Don't try to Upgrade Your HDD -- Edited"
I used this product over the weekend to backup a full primary 10GB hard drive and restore it on a new 160GB hard drive. It backed up fine, but it restored the data onto a 10GB partition of my larger disk and left the rest unallocated. I could not find a way to get it to dump the data on the drive as a whole. This leaves me with having to use a partition management program to merge or change the partition sizes. I didn't want any partitions on the disk, but with Ghost 12 I had no choice. I have a choice in whether I will buy another Symantec/Norton product though. I WON'T.

Update:
After researching further I found the "resize" check box that allows Ghost to use the entire drive. The problem is, the options dialog was somewhat buried (it did not come up during the Restore Wizard on my first run through). By my second try it had already split my drive into a small portion and a large unallocated portion. Why Ghost has to default to this configuration is the mystery. Why would anyone want to take a new clean hard drive bigger than the image file and leave part (or in my case most) of the drive unallocated? Why is this the default for Ghost? The custom boot disk I had it create for use with my USB external drive worked, but the interface is a bit odd. I'll add a star to my review for this oversight, but am still stuck with a drive that's full and have to use another application to correct it.

"Ghost 2003 at its best"
I have used ghost since Ingram Micro owned it. Ghost 2003 was the last version of the old ghost product. It added nice new features, but not very reliable. If you have the latest upgrade for Ghost 2003, it added support for SATA drives. The big disappointment was/is that it can't reliably backup to an external USB drive. I have successfully created an image on an external USB drive on several occasions. Repartitioned the source drive, then attempted to reimage C from the external drive using the same boot disk that made the image. Ghost was unable to see the USB drive it had earlier found and used to make an image.
More recently, I discovered from sources on the internet that USB, "universal" serial bus devices are not universal. Apparently Ghost only has drivers for Iomega USB devices. In order to complete the reimaging, I had to dismantle the external drive and connect it as an internal drive. That is something Ghost 5 could do.
More recently, with machines that only have SATA drives, I have found the latest version of Ghost will allow me to ghost to SATA drives, but not reliably.

Relief was just a short step away in the form of Acronis's True Image. Better yet, if you are in the market for a new Seagate SATA drive, the drive includes Seagates Disk Wizard software, which is a free copy of Acronis! This is a slightly reduced version of Acronis but actually it has better options.

Cheers,