I have Norton Ghost 10 installed on my Dell PC. It is supposed to back up hard drive on another target drive. I'll try and describe the problem the best I can:

When Norton attempts to back up my hard drive, I get an error message:

EC8F17B7: Cannot create recovery point for job: Complete system backup. Errors exist. Target disk full.

If I try and optimize recovery point storage it suggests deleting old recovery points, but there are none to delete. So, the target disk is full and I can't seem to delete everything so the application can do routine back ups.
Any suggestions appreciated.

This is Windows XP home edition.

Amy

This post has been edited by NYTerrier: Dec 11 2006, 09:21 PM

It seems Ghost is telling you that the target disk has insufficient room to accomodate the ghost image of disk C. If you can't increase the free space on the target-disk, then you'll have to try reducing the amount of data on 'C' drive.

My method is to make a ghost image of a basic XP installation (since that's all you need to re-install Windows when it goes pear-shaped, without having to re-activate it). This reduces the size of the image file considerably, compared to creating an image of Windows with all the third-party programs installed. Programs don't need to be part of the image because you can re-install them separately after you've done a restore from the ghost image.

Finally, a word of advice concerning Ghost. Version 9 needs Windows to run. If you intend to make an image of the Windows disk (C drive), it is bad practice to create it while Windows is running. Image files can be corrupted in those cicumstances. If you have Ghost 2003 that is much better at doing the job because it can be run in DOS (the preferred method for imaging the operating system).

Thank you for your reply. I understand in theory what you are saying, I just don't know how to accomplish it. At this point I would like to understand why there are no points for me to recover and the target disk is full (it seems like an anomaly to me, if something is full, shouldn't there be a point or set of points to delete?).

My hard drive is 17.3 GB used and 33.8 GB free and the D recovery drive is 18.2GB. If I could figure out how to erase the contents of the D drive (Norton Ghost Target) and start over with the backup, I would be better off. Then I would need to know what steps to take to direct Norton Ghost to what it needs to back up (since I have all the program disks that came with the computer). The amount of space used on the hard drive compared to what is available on the D drive is very close, which is probably aggravating the problem. We don't have many things that we can delete at this point.

I appreciate your patience, the Symantec website is not very helpful. Thanks.