I haven't tried Ghost 12 yet, but have you tried searching the manual for
the word boot? You may be able to create a set of boot floppies like the
2003 version could. I managed to get what I needed from the boot floppies
and burned a bootable CD set up so that I could run the DOS Ghost.exe and
GDisk.exe. I found that my older Ghost.exe did not save or restore the new
Vista master boot record, so I included the freely downloadable MbrWizD.exe
on my bootable CD. This can save the Vista MBR as a small file and later
restore it.

Anyhow, with a similar bootable CD set up to install DOS USB drivers and
Firewire drivers, you should be able to back up your partitions to an
external USB or Firewire hard drive or possibly to DVDs. For my WXP laptop,
I did the same thing, and wound up creating a bootable DVD that could
restore the laptop to its 'out of the box' condition. Vista is somewhat
bigger, so even with full compression, it doesn't all fit on one DVD-DL.

See whether your Ghost 12 still has the boot disc wizard and post back if
you want help setting up a bootable CD/DVD.

-Paul Randall

"Sam" <sam@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:GVVCi.9186$Y7.5444@bignews3.bellsouth.net...
>I just picked up Norton Ghost 12 to use with Vista and I'm thoroughly
>confused. Before I contact (and probably have to pay for) support I
>thought I'd see if anyone here had used it and could answer my questions.
>
> All I want to do is use the boot disk and backup the system partition, but
> it looks like they've changed the way it works.
>
> The boot disk is only giving me recovery options and no backup ones. Is
> everything done from the "client app" now?
>
> My Dell E521 has two recovery partitions (the Dell Utility and Vista
> recovery) that I'd also like to backup but they aren't showing up in the
> list of drives. Can I not select raw partitions on the disk? Am I
> limited only to drives that are mapped by the OS?
>
> In case of 100% disk failure I expected to be able to boot from the
> recovery CD and restore the two recovery partitions, the OS, (and an
> additional files/games partitions on Disk 0) on a replacement disk. How
> am I supposed to recover a failed disk?
>
> I like the old way because it operated outside the OS. I'm not sure I
> like this whole "recovery service" idea. If all I wanted was an suped up
> version of Vista's System Restore I wouldn't have bothered.
>
>
>