Know anything about Ghost's virtpart.dat?

Does anyone here know precisely what sort of information's contained in the VIRTPART.DAT file of Symantec's Ghost application? I'm trying to figure out why my Ghost imaging app will no longer run, having just put in a newer and bigger main hard drive. I've upgraded hard drives in the presence of Ghost before and had no problem, but this time Ghost doesn't seem to recognise the new drive. Only my destination drive (an ext drive) comes up in the PC-DOS dialog. I've of course made sure that both Windows itself and the Windows environment of Ghost have recognised the new drive.

I've heard it said that you can delete VIRTPART.DAT, contained in the root partition of the drive, if you wish and that it'd be reformed when you next boot but I'm wary of trying that, as if it contains references to all my partition images now stored on the ext drive, I clearly wouldn't want those wiped out.

Please don't give the obvious advice, like 'ditch Ghost and get something better'. I'm looking for someone with some real knowledge of Ghost. I can't afford to lose my whole library of partition images made over some years with Ghost.

I think the problem is that Ghost is still thinking that the new drive has partition sizes that were the old sizes. In other words, whatever it's referencing for its information, it's thinking that the old drive is still present.

The version of Ghost is the 2003 version. Symantec have long since stopped support for it.

I suppose you could always rename it and then rename it back if you have issues.

I can't really help you with Ghost since I ditched that back whenever Ghost32 came out and I ditched Ghost32 when Acronis True Image came out so it's been quite some time since I used the DOS version of Ghost.

It's possible that you've hit some size limit that Ghost doesn't recognize but I'm just guessing.

From further tests I've tried, it appears that although Ghost's Windows environment correctly recognises the new drive and its partitions, the special DOS environment of Ghost, in which partition imaging, drive cloing and recovery are performed, does not. It recognises my USB-connected drive still, to which I normally image, but it can no longer find the new main disc. As I see it, this points to a partition table problem - an MBR problem.

When I cloned from my old 80GB drive to the new 250GB drive, everything copied across fine (it seemed), but when you really think about it, there's every reason for a problem ensuing, because I've presumably ended up with the partition table for the old 80GB drive on the 250GB drive. Is that crazy, or not?

It looks to me that the MBR needs reinitialising, somehow. Would that be fixmbr? Use Recovery Console, maybe? Any suggestions?

BTW, I tried the renaming of the virtual partition (VP). I then ran a Ghost utility to recreate a VP, which it did. But as far as I could tell, it was identical to the first VP file. No change in the problem.

Re Acronis True Image (ATI), I've been reasonably impressed with the reviews on ATI, over these last few years, but I did note some while ago that, with ATI, you can't do backup images of individual partitions, you can only back up (clone) a complete drive. That being so, ATI's not for me.

Provided the OS is at least WinXP or Win2K SP3, there's no hard disc size limitation in Ghost 2003. The manual for it states that quite categorically. The breakpoint is usually 138GB. None of my new partitions are that big, anyway.