Hi, all experts. I'm having problem with Norton Ghost 10 Recovery Disk. I tried to boot the PC with the CD into recovery environment. Unfortunately, it went through the loading process then come to a grey screen, with a big mouse pointer.

Later on, the screen refreshed and the mouse pointer turn smaller followed by restarting the machine. It looks the CD failed to boot the PC. Anyone come across this before? Pls advise. Thanks.

Dani AI

Generated

As reported, the Ghost 10 recovery CD gets as far as a gray screen with a large pointer and then reboots. As pointed out, that rescue media runs a lightweight Windows PE environment and can fail when it lacks drivers for the machine it’s booting. correctly notes a custom recovery image from Symantec often fixes driver gaps, but there are several practical troubleshooting steps to try before requesting custom media.

  • Verify the ISO/CD itself: test the disc or ISO on another PC, or remount the ISO in Windows to confirm it is not corrupt. Re-burn the disc at the slowest burn speed and try a different brand of CD-R if available.
  • Isolate the optical drive: internal drives are more reliable for older rescue media than some USB external drives—try a different drive if possible.
  • Check BIOS/UEFI storage mode: change SATA mode to IDE/Compatibility (or vice versa) and disable any RAID setting temporarily; older PE images often don’t include AHCI/RAID drivers. Note: change settings back after testing.
  • Remove peripheral hardware that might confuse the PE (extra USB devices, card readers, PCI cards).
  • Try restoring from another host: attach the problem drive to a working machine and run Ghost there to apply the image. This avoids the suspect recovery media entirely.
  • If you have a licensed copy, build or obtain recovery media that includes your system’s storage/network/display drivers so the PE can see the hardware.

If those steps fail, the remaining reliable fixes are to (a) get a vendor/customized recovery ISO that includes the specific drivers for your controller, or (b) create a custom WinPE-based rescue that injects the needed drivers (mass-storage + display). Both require access to the correct drivers and, for option (a), a valid product license. This collection of quick checks will usually determine whether the problem is a bad burn, an unsupported controller, or simply missing drivers.

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What kind of system are you running? What kind of motherboard is in the machine?

That CD uses a version of Windows called WinPE, and it often has limited driver support.

I know it is a while since you posted this, but I had the same problem. I figured out the fix it just yesterday.

For starters, I hope you actually bought the program because the fix requires some help from symantec.

Basically, the default restore CD is packaged largely incomplete and is missing a lot of drivers for a lot of system. This is why they do the driver validation during initial install. Every computer I have used Ghost 10 with needs extra driver here or there maybe for RAID, maybe for SCSI, or something else. What you need to do is get a custom CD from symantec. The instructions are here.

They are surprisingly fast with sending the replacement CD. I got mine within 2 hours of my request. They will send you a link to an FTP with a zipfile containing a replacement ISO.

This should fix your problem.

If you want a for many computers, get Hirens Boot CD. I have version 9, and that is actually be best recovery solution period. Included is partition software, diagnostic software. It also is packaged with Ghost 8.4, I think.

I will say that the benefit of Ghost 10 is that the recovery process is literally ten times faster that previous versions of Ghost that I have tried. Mine restored 6 GB of info in less then 10 minutes, somehow.

Unfortunately, to use Ghost 10, there is a good chance that you will need a custom recovery disk. Which means you will need a real license. Makes pirating the software pretty much useless.

Warm regards,


littlemrwiggley

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