Question : Ghost claims C drive is unmounted

I recently purchased Ghost 12.0 to help back up my new internal hard drive.  Before I swapped hard drives, the demo version of Ghost seemed to work fine.  With the new hard drive, however, Ghost claims it is unmounted and won't allow me to back it up using the normal "recovery point" process.  It says the C drive is unmounted.  This seems silly as I'm running Windows from it -- how can it be unmouted?

I got on Symantecs tech support chat, and the technician brought up the Disk Management tool, pointed to my "Disk 0" drive and basically said "See, it's not called C so Ghost can't use it."  Disk Management wouldn't allow it to be changed to C (only G, H, I, etc.).  The technician threw up his hands and suggested I call the hard disk manufacturer.  

I originally set up this new drive with my original windows XP Home setup CD, then restored a backup of the original drive using a different backup program (Stompsoft PC Backup) .  

How can my C drive be unmounted?  And how can I fix it?

Answer : Ghost claims C drive is unmounted

>> but instead I set up the new drive with the Windows Setup disk, installed PC Backup, copied the backup files over to the new disk, and restored.  Made sense at the time, but maybe that's what created this mess.

Thanks for the complete information.  I agree that the "copied the backup files over the new disk" is/was probably the start of the problems and the start of having a "non-standard" XP system.

I don't think Ghost 10 will create an image backup until the XP registry and C: disk management issue is resolved.  It is likely more an XP problem rather than a Ghost problem.

You might give Acronis True Image 11 a try.  It is a very good (some say better than Ghost) image backup program.  Ghost and TrueImage are probably the two most popular.  True Image has a free trial so you can see if it will backup your c: drive.  TrueImage also allows you to boot from their RecoveryCD and take the backup image in a true off-line mode (which Ghost doesn't allow).  That could be your solution because then the backup is completely unaware of the operating system.  You are booting from the TrueImage CD, and then backing up the system partition.  Not quite as convenient as on-line backup, but some say offline has advantages (such as a non-standard system).
http://www.acronis.com/

Another approach might be to open a new problem with just the question "How can I get my XP system partition assigned a correct drive letter c: ?" without going into the Ghost issue.  Some other XP experts may be more familiar on how to repair your existing system.

In the long run, you are probably going to have to do a clean install (reformat the drive) of XP to get rid of any lingering or hidden issues (like your CD drive).