ghost 2003 boot CD? (instead of floppy)

[Davegod]

Since I dont have a floppy connected to this PC, is it possible to make a boot CD for Norton Ghost? All I can find is instructons for making boot floppy. I know WinXP setup etc can boot from CD, and Nero can make "normal" boot CDs( like this), so why not a boot CD for ghost?

I guess perhaps making a Nero boot CD and adding the files from here (" If you have problems with the Ghost boot floppy, I have posted alternative boot files here. Simply load these files onto a freshly-formatted floppy disk, and copy ghost.exe to the floppy"). MIGHT well work, but buggered if I want to find out it doesnt work when I really need it.

I will be keeping my ghost images on the second hard disk, at least until I get a DVD burner anyway.

 

[warcrow]

Originally posted by: Davegod
Since I dont have a floppy connected to this PC, is it possible to make a boot CD for Norton Ghost? All I can find is instructons for making boot floppy. I know WinXP setup etc can boot from CD, and Nero can make "normal" boot CDs( like this), so why not a boot CD for ghost?

I guess perhaps making a Nero boot CD and adding the files from here (" If you have problems with the Ghost boot floppy, I have posted alternative boot files here. Simply load these files onto a freshly-formatted floppy disk, and copy ghost.exe to the floppy"). MIGHT well work, but buggered if I want to find out it doesnt work when I really need it.

I will be keeping my ghost images on the second hard disk, at least until I get a DVD burner anyway.

As far as I can recall, Ghost will not make a bootable CD. If you poke around, you will be able to find some people who made one (acting as a virtual FDD). But what I recommend s just picking up a DVD buner. I know lite-on now makes DVD burners for aprox $150 or less. It supports all 4 formats (-/+R & -/+RW). You can just save the image to disk and Ghost will make this bootable, so no floppy will be needed. Thats what I did. I did a fresh install of XP, updated all drivers, installed all apps that I wanted (AIM, firewall, ect), tweaked out the OS, then imaged it. Now when I go to reinstall it takes 5 mins...and thats not an exageration.

 

[Davegod]

I was considering buying one recently, but it came down to either a 160gb hard disk or a DVD-burner. Only having a 40gb disk kinda made it an easy choice. I guess I'll dust off the floppy drive and stick it in just to make a boot floppy... and hopefully not have to put it back to boot off it.

 

[SearchMaster]

AFAIK, Ghost will not make a boot CD natively, but yes, you can put your boot floppy images on CD!

I cannot recommend Ultimate Boot CD highly enough. Download the stuff from the site, then you can use your Ghost floppy (and rawread.exe) to create an IMG file that can be added to the UBCD menu. Now you have a CD that will allow you to boot into Ghost, but contains dozens of other utilities as well, like hard drive diagnostic programs, various FDisk utilities, MemTest, etc. I had tried to mess around with other boot disk utilities, but this is the easiest (IMHO) and best around.

Here's what I do: I have a small network at home (+- 4PCs). One machine is strictly for Ghost backups. I have created Ghost boot images with network drivers for all the various network configurations on my network. I just put the UBCD in the box I'm backing up, and another copy in my Ghost machine, and do a network master/slave backup.

If you need any assistance, let me know. I'd be happy to help. I know sometimes Ghost 2003 requires two floppies - I have not tried this configuration yet. I use Ghost 2002 where all my network boot floppies can fit on a single floppy.

 

[SearchMaster]

And while my post concentrates on network Ghosting, it does work for CDR/DVDR backups as well. I have those floppy images on my disk as well.

 

[Davegod]

:beer: