Pure DOS cannot see a modern NVMe drive without a proprietary driver. Furthermore, Secure Boot will block the DOS bootloader. To use Ghost on a 2020+ laptop, you must disable Secure Boot and switch the SATA controller to "Legacy" or "IDE" mode in BIOS—which reduces performance.
| Issue | Details | |-------|---------| | | Cannot boot or image GPT disks in native UEFI mode. Legacy BIOS + MBR only. | | No NVMe/SSD TRIM awareness | Restoring to SSDs may degrade performance over time. | | 4K sector alignment | Older versions misalign partitions, hurting SSD/advanced format HDDs. | | Driver incompatibility | Lacks modern SATA/NVMe/RAID drivers out of box (must be injected manually into WinPE). | | Proprietary .gho/.v2i format | Tools like ghost32.exe -clone are command-line driven but poorly documented for scripting. | | No encryption | Images stored without native AES protection. | Norton Ghost 11.5.1
It is important to distinguish the legacy Ghost 11.5.1 format from the newer formats that emerged later. Symantec eventually shifted focus to a technology called , which utilized the .v2i (Virtual Volume Image) format. Pure DOS cannot see a modern NVMe drive