Norton Ghost Advice (1 Viewer)

[Kris McLaughlin]

Hi everyone,
It's time for me to reformat & reinstall my Win2k box. Just wondering if anyone has a step-by-step method that they use to ghost the system once everything is reinstalled. (Using Ghost 2002). The documentation for Win2k didn't really clear it up for me.
How do I deal with NTFS hard drives? I think ghost is unable to read/write to NTFS since it's basically a DOS program, right?
If this is the case, should I just set up a Fat32 partition & keep the image on there?

(Brian's post got me thinking, but I don't need to back up to CDR, I have lots of hard drives to keep the image on.)

Cheers,

 

[Rob Gillespie]

The only NTFS limitation Ghost has is that it can't create an image file on an NTFS partition (however this has been fixed in version 2003). It can make an image of an NTFS source and restore that image back perfectly OK. But you must place that image file onto a FAT/FAT32 partition while you're actually Ghost-ing.

The process is pretty simple. Boot into DOS from floppy or boot CD, run the Ghost .exe file (ghostpe.exe) and selection Partition >> To Image. Alternatively, you can do Drive >> To Image and image entire physical hard drive.

The main limitation is that you can't save the image file on the same partition as the source (or the same drive, if you're doing the entire thing).

You have some option which are detailed in the manual (and I do suggest you go through them as Ghost was never really meant to be a beginner's tool). All can be controlled by entering various command line options when you run the .exe. Some of them can be set while you're in Ghost itself. You'll probably want to apply some compression to keep the image file size down to a minimum. You'll get prompted to set this when you start the image process. Alternatively, you can use the -z option at the command line.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Rob pretty much explained it. Sure, Ghost is a DOS program, but remember DOS had no protected mode or anything else to stop software from bypassing the OS and talking directly to the disk hardware. So Ghost bypasses DOS. The good folks at Norton rolled their own file system drivers to read and write FAT32 and to read NTFS.

 

[Kris McLaughlin]

Thanks for the replies, guys. I might look into Ghost2003, sounds like it might be more convenient. I don't think it's that expensive, anyway.

Cheers,

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Or look at Drive Image, which has been able to write to NTFS partitons for a while.

 

[MikeyWeitz]

Drive image is the way to go. I use their enterprise edition to deploy my custom image on all of my new xp machines at work. It's the bomb!