Does anyone know if Norton Ghost 2003 is compatible with the NEC DVD writer, model ND3550A? Operating system is Win2KSP4.

The NEC ND3550A is a dual-layer +/- format DVD writer.

Symantec do publish a list of compatible DVD and CD drives for Ghost 2003 but the DVD list doesn't include any NEC drives.

I currently use Ghost 2003 with an NEC ND1100A, a single-layer + format DVD writer and whilst Ghost 2003 happily writes my partition backups to CDs on the 1100A drive, it doesn't write to DVDs (although everyday drag n' drop works fine with DVDs on the 1100A). Instead, the + format writeable DVDs I use in the drive are interpreted by Ghost 2003 as writeable CDs. Thus, I'm wondering if an ND3550A will also fail to be written to, when it comes to using DVDs for partition backups.

Does anyone know if Ghost 2003 is particularly sensitive to the drive's writing polarity, ie. whether + or - discs are used?

Needless to say, Symantec no longer supports Ghost 2003 and they've long since stopped updating the drive compatibility list of theirs.

Hi Packman,

I have burned 4.7GB DVD-Rs using Ghost 2003 on an ND-3520, so chances are your's will work too!

Cheers,
Christian

Hi Christian. Thanks for the prompt reply. It's good to learn that partition imaging to DVD-Rs works on the ND3520. Have you tried that with DVD+Rs (if the 3520 supports DVD+Rs) or with DVD-RWs, though?

It was about two or three years ago when I first tried using Ghost 2003 to backup a partition to my existing ND1100A. After much soul-searching and many repeated attempts, I finally gave up trying to use DVD+RWs (or indeed any DVDs) in that particular situation and have since relied instead on periodically making the partition image to a reserved partition on the same physical hard drive. Not ideal, but it has come in handy once or twice! But now my root partition's that big that I can only fit two images of it in that particular partition of the hard drive, and very soon there'll only be room for just one. Thus, I'm looking once again at the possibility of imaging my root partition to a DVD of some sort.

I keep wondering whether, way back, I was using the wrong technique for imaging to the DVD+RW. I did it from the Windows environment. With the ND3520, how have YOU used Ghost to do it? From the Windows environment, or from the Ghost DOS environment, or some other method? I'd be interested to hear.

What I recall is that Ghost would treat my DVD+RWs (and DVD+Rs, for that matter) as CD+RWs. Ghost would write a 600MB image on to the first DVD but that's all. The actual total image size would be around 4GB. Ghost would then ask for the second disc to be put in the drive. And so on. At the time, I tried all sorts of things to fool Ghost into working properly but without success.

So, if I do now get an ND3550A, I'll want to be pretty certain that imaging on to DVD with Ghost 2003 will work. Over the last few years, I've applied all the Ghost 2003 updates, BTW.