ghost image restor mess

I backed up a laptop w/ Ghost corporate site from a self-made CD of mine, and I’ve used that CD many, many times.

What I did was make the image to a USB drive, and put the USB drive into another laptop, open the ghost image w/ ghost explorer, and recover the files I need to restore after re doing the laptop.

I hooked the USB drive in another PC, opened the ghost image, and it opened w/o any problems; saw all the folders listed but didn’t try to extract anything.  The image file is a tad over 20gig.

This laptop was loaded w/ viruses, and what I decided to do was erase the hard drive and put a fresh installation of XP on it. The laptop in the laptop has no physical damage.

Now I’m having trouble w/ even opening the ghost image. When I try to open the image ghost explorer stays up for a while and then closes itself w/o opening any of the image file. I’ve tried opening the image file using ghost explorer in Windows XP through Windows 8, and tried to check the image file from the boot CD I use, all w/o success.

I think my mistake may have been this:
I installed XP from scratch, everything was up & going, but for some reason I had a pain getting the wireless to work. I had already installed everything on the laptop including open office, and just being proactive I made a ghost image of the fresh XP as well. Just out of curiosity, I installed another copy of XP from a different XP CD, and after the install the wireless worked fine. Come to find out the wireless didn’t work due to a BIOS update, and all I did was restore the image I made of fresh XP, restored fine & laptop was back up w/ the wireless working, but this is when the problem starts.

It seems to me when I made the image of the fresh XP the file system, the index, or whatever the proper term may be was screwed up on the USB drive. The USB drive has no physical problems but just a messed up file system.

I right clicked on the USB drive & used scanned for errors, and the results were 5 found & fixed; had something to do w/ index. I’m looking through the event viewer to see if I can get the results of the disk scan.

I’ve tried different switches w/ ghost explorer; -corrupt –ignoreindex. Using either of the switches makes ghost explorer stay up longer but still closes itself eventually.  There could be more command line switches for me to try, but was wondering if anyone had any other ideas.

I used ghost off the CD and checked the image file, but after the integrity check stopped and there were a bunch of error codes on the screen; this is booting of a PC DOS disk created by ghost.

I do have the home version of Ghost 10, but I’ve tried that and does not seem you can open the .gho extension w/ that version. It’s hard for me to say the version of ghost explorer I use is too old considering the file did open the first time I tried it; unfortunately I should have extracted the stuff then.

I’ve tried using ghost32 & ghost64 while in Windows to restore the image to an added hard drive, and a ghost error comes up including something about inconsistent.

I don’t know of anything else that will open image files except ghost explorer itself. I don’t think the ghost suite for mass image deployment is even made anymore?

So, I’m running out of ideas, and the image did have her documents and so on in it. From now on, I’ll use ghost and an additional way of making another image w/u ghost.

When I started the fresh XP install I choose to low level format the drive, and when I used another XP CD to install I did a quick format; both w/ NTFS.

I don’t know if there’s any software able to recover data after a full & a quick format to a hard drive, or if there’s some magical file system fixer I can use on the USB drive.

Thanks for any other ideas or suggestions.