After having installed the bare necessities onto my new computer, I decided to use Norton Ghost to back-up my system partition, so that restoring will take much less time if something happens. Well, it turned out to be another adventure, that almost ended in my losing my whole installation. The Ghost I have comes from a Norton Systemworks 2003 installation disk. When I installed and ran it, it rebooted the PC into its own fresh-created virtual partition in order to create the backup. However, shortly after entering its startup screen after rebooting, Ghost hanged. I let it run for a few minutes just to make sure it's not busy, but it was simply dead. So I restarted the computer, and Ghost booted again (it modified the MBR of the hard drive to boot into its virtual partition). It hanged again, so on the next reboot I asked it to go back to my Windows... No luck, Ghost reported an error and hanged in its DOS screen. Ouch... I Googled a bit and came up with an advice to log into Ghost's DOS and call ghreboot. That didn't work, and Ghost died again. It appears that this is a known problem with Ghost, and it even has a name - "the Ghost boot loop". Nice, eh ? In my case, it appears to be happening because the Ghost of Systemworks 2003 doesn't support SATA hard-drives. Half exasperated at this point, I kept Googling, and found out that an access to a Windows 98 rescue floppy with FDISK can help me solve the problem. But I don't have such a floppy, and neither do I have a floppy drive :-) But this gave me an idea. I booted into my ultimate boot CD copy, ran FDISK and removed Ghost's partition. Then, I activated my C: partition back, rebooted and viola, Windows came back. Phew, that was close. I still haven't backed up my system partition though...