So, the first problem is, why will my PC not boot from the Norton Save & Restore Recovery Disk. It *used* to, when I first bought the programme 4½ years ago. It's not because my OS was corrupted, because it still won't work afterthe clean reinstall. I have tried it in both a new dvd-burner drive and a very old plain cd-player drive and it doesn't work with either of them. It gets as far as the bit where it says "Microsoft Corporation" and there's little green bars trickling across from left to right, and then it either sticks there or goes on to a blank screen.
I have tried it with a new burn of the Save & Restore Recovery Disk, and with a more modern Norton Ghost 15 Recovery Disk, which does exactly the same thing, and with a bang-up-to-the-minute trial disk for the new Symantec System Recovery - that one generates an error message suggesting that it's not compatible with my cpu.
So the fist question is, why does my system no longer boot from a Norton Save & Restore Recovery Disk when it used to do so, and I haven't changed my OS? I *have* changed my mainboard, btw - but to one of the same model as I had before. Is it possible that there's some BIOS switch which prevents it from booting successfully from these discs? It *will* boot from other bootable CDs, so it's not that it has a problem with CDs per se. It seems unlikely to be to do with these CDs being home-burned since the problem exists with two different optical drives.
If it isn't possible to get the Norton/Symantec products to work, does anybody know of another good backup programme which I can use to make small compressed images of my C: drive in a reasionably fast and trouble-free way?
One of the things which I lost when I ahd to do a clean reinstall was my isntallation of the Virtual Magnifying Glass progrmmae - a massively useful little app which I'd been using several times a day for years. I find that I cannot reinstall it, which is maddening. Iclick on the installation file, it brings up the dialogue which says the publisher cannot be verified and am I sure I want to proceed, I click Run - and nothing happens. Yet, I am able to run other .exe installation files, including ones with unverified publishers, without difficulty.
I have tried turning off my virus checker (AVG) but it didn't help. I think from the way it's described on sourceforge that it's possible in contains some kind of proprietary installation wizard, so I wondered if this was clashing in some way with XP's own installer. What can I do to get back this very useful app?