How to handle a corrupted ghost image file.

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite
• Deployment Solution

Issue/Introduction

Ghost Solution Suite or Deployment Solution Suite, displays a message indicating that the image file is damaged or corrupted, or a Technical Support agent or Knowledge Base document has indicated this. You need to know how to get the image file to work.

Environment

GSS 3.x

DS 8.x

Resolution

When the image file is corrupted, it cannot be repaired. Ghost does not include any features for repairing corrupted image files. You must create a new image file instead.

In some cases, what appears to be a corrupted image file is actually corruption on the source drive (the drive that you created an image of). Before creating a new image file, determine whether the corruption is actually in the image file or whether the corruption is on the source drive. If the corruption is on the source drive, repair the source drive before creating a new image file.

To determine whether the image file is corrupted, see the document How to verify the integrity of an image file.

Determining whether there is corruption on the source drive
Because Ghost does not normally detect corruption on the source drive while Ghost is creating an image file, check the source drive with a disk utility, such as Microsoft's CheckDisk (CHKDSK), before creating an image file.

When you suspect problems with the image file and the Ghost integrity check did not find any problems, use a disk utility to find and repair problems on the source disk. If the disk utility does not find problems in the disk structure or file system, run the utility to find and repair surface problems such as corrupt disk sectors. Once the disk problems have been repaired, create a new image file.

Recovering important files
If there are files in the image that you must recover, try opening the image file with Ghost Explorer to extract the files needed.

If you cannot extract the files, run Ghost Explorer from the command line with the switches -IGNOREINDEX and -CORRUPT.

• Using -IGNOREINDEX
  Ghost includes an index file within each image file, and uses the index to find the other files that are in the image file. The -IGNOREINDEX switch opens Ghost Explorer and tells Ghost Explorer to find the files by reading directly from the image file, rather than from the index file.
  
  To use the switch, run GhostExp.exe from a DOS command line:
  
  "C:\Program Files\Symantec\Ghost\Ghostexp.exe" -ignoreindex
  
  You may need to change the path to match the path on your computer.
   
• Using -CORRUPT
  When Ghost Explorer encounters file corruption in an image file, it normally reports an error and stops. When you use the -corrupt switch, Ghost Explorer ignores the corrupt area of the file and attempts to find the next file in the image.
  
  To use the switch, run GhostExp.exe from a DOS command line:
  
  "C:\Program Files\Symantec\Ghost\Ghostexp.exe" -corrupt