Error: "Couldn't contact Ghost Start Agent"

[Jonathan Sachs]

I've installed Norton Ghost 2003 on Windows XP. I'm trying to run a
backup; when I click the Backup button I get a message that says,
"Couldn't contact Ghost Start Agent. (0x800700c1)"

After displaying that message, Ghost lets me proceed to set up the
backup. When it's time to reboot and perform the backup, though, it
displays the message again and halts.

I also tried cloning the disk, but I got the same message.

Looking at my computer's list of services, I see that
GhostStartService is installed and set to "Automatic," but is not
running. When I try to start it, I get the mesage "Could not start
the GhostStartService on Local Computer. Error 193: 0xc1."

I'm having a similar problem with my regular backup program
(NovaBACKUP), which is why I'm trying to use Ghost. I really, REALLY
want a bootable copy of my system before I try to repair it.

[nigel...@gmail.com]

Error 0x800700C1 is a different way of packaging up the same error
code, 0xC1 or 193 in decimal, that you're seeing when manually
starting the service.

That is a Windows error code defined as ERROR_BAD_EXE_FORMAT; the most
common reason for it is trying to mingle 64-bit and 32-bit code but it
can also happen from corrupt Windows system files. Since there's no 64-
bit code in Ghost 2003 or in Windows XP, it's likely that in your case
some core Windows system files are full of corrupt data or the hard
disk is failing to let them be read for some reason. If this is the
case all kinds of programs will be failing to run and won't be able to
do much of anything from within Windows if this is the case.

As long as the cause isn't that the filesystem on the disk is damaged,
you might be able to get a Ghost image by booting the Ghost 2003
install CD into a DOS environment.

For actually repairing the root problem, the first port of call I
would recommend is going to be the Windows System File Checker. The
SFC.EXE tool in Windows is intended for this kind of circumstance and
there's a good article on it at this site which addresses the 0xC1
kind of corrupt system DLL problem here:

http://blogs.technet.com/askcore/archive/2007/12/18/using-system-file-checker-sfc-to-fix-issues.aspx

- Nigel