Question : Problems booting from Norton Ghost 10.0 Recovery CD

I am having problems on two different computers running WXP Pro in getting Norton Ghost 10.0 to boot from the recovery CD.  On one computer it will not boot at all -- it just gets to a point where it says the computer is shutting down to prevent damage.  On the other computer, it only boots if my hard disk boot sector is not corrupt.  I caled Norton and they had me download the latest version of the boot cd.  That does not fix the problem.  Does anyone know if these are common problems with Ghost?  What is the best backup software to use?  Norton seems to work well when I don't need it!

Answer : Problems booting from Norton Ghost 10.0 Recovery CD

I forgot one of the main reasons the boot sector and Master Boot Record must be readable and usable:  You can't read a disk drive until you read in the master boot record.  Nowadays the boot sector is fairly standard code, but it is not uncommon for the boot sector to contain for example code for a drive-overlay.  Disk manufacturers used drive overlay to overcome bios issues.  Also encryption code could be in the mbr.  So if you can't load that code, then there is no way to know what is on the disk, much less read it.

Hence, Ghost (or any booting program) must be able to read the boot sector before it can read the disk contents.

More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_sector
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record