Since I get quite a surprising amount of direct e-mail about this, I though it'd be good to provide an overview of what we've learned about these situations along with a direct link to the tool.
Some advice for situations where there are problems opening images:
1) In many of these cases, the root cause is that some data loss has occurred; if Ghost Explorer isn't able to open your image, it's usually because the essential data at the end of the image that Explorer needs to display the content is gone.
In this case, the
very first thing to try is recovering the image with Ghost using the -ntexact switch. Ghost processes images front-to-back, whereas Explorer actually processes it from the end (where Ghost stores a summary index of all the spans in the image and all the files as well). If you are lucky then only the index data is seriously damaged and it may restore fine. Even if Ghost fails, if it gets most of the way through there's an excellent chance that the volume can have
chkdsk run on it and the content can be recovered.
2) If restoring with Ghost fails with an "End of File" error (number 10008), then the data loss may well have occurred when the image was first taken, and as a result the Ghost header is missing a flag that says it wrote the image over multiple spans. This means that you won't be able to recover the image using Ghost as suggested above, because of the error 10008.
In order to get past that error and restore the image to a disk, you can try using
this command-line tool to set the missing "spanned image" flag using the "span" option.
All this is intended to do is get past error 10008 to let you restore the image using Ghost; it probably won't let Explorer run because the most likely cause of the span bit missing is a failure during the image write that also means the end of the image is damaged.
3) The main additional problem aside from actual image data damage that blocks Explorer is when images were taken starting with a image-to-disk and then subsequent spans were continued on CD or DVD. Image spans written to CD or DVD have (for no particularly good reason) a slightly different structure to normal spans; the first span written to a CD contains the regular image header data, but later spans on the same CD do not.
There's a special bit in the .GHO header that tells Ghost and Explorer that spans with missing headers are OK and not to panic. If you start imaging to a hard disk and switch to CD or DVD later on, the structure of the span files is in the CD mode but the restore code doesn't know about it and neither Ghost nor Explorer tend to be happy. There isn't any data loss in this particular case, this is just a design oversight stopping access to the data.
This flag, the "CD bit", can also be set by
this tool, using the "cd" option.
4) There are a small number of images where Explorer fails internally while opening them (it doesn't prompt for the last span over and over, as it does if there is actual damage to the image). If you have a version prior to GSS2.0.1, this may be due to a problem handling an unusual layout of some of the internal NTFS data, and the 2.0.1 Explorer may be abe to deal with this case.
In this case, it's a good idea to obtain the GSS2 trialware - it should be that the current trialware is build 1532 and this has the fix to that case. The version of Explorer included in the trialware isn't restricted and should be able to be used fine with images from older versons of Ghost.
[ The exception to this is that Explorer's new NTFS editing won't be useful, because older Ghost versions don't understand the new extensions to the image format. It's best to not "recompile" the images with this version of Explorer if you want to use them with an older version of Ghost. ]
5) If all the above suggestions aren't enough, by all means get in touch. It's a good idea to be able to supply or post a GHOSTERR.TXT file from a failed Ghost restore, because that will tell us a lot more about the overall structure of the image, and in particular the data it contains will give us an idea of what to suggest next.