Ghosting a clean install of an OS?

[BimmerGuy330]

I'm not sure if this is the right term, but what software would I need to make an "image" of my hard drive after a fresh install of WinXP? I want to install XP, install my apps, get everything configured the way I like it, and then save that configuration as an image. How would I go about doing this?

If I install on a large partition, will the image be huge? Should I like make a 4gig partition so that it's not too big? Also, if I made a small partition, would I be able to fit it on a CD? Or more then one?

I searched for "ghost", but didn't come up with much, other then problems people were having.

Thanks for any help!

 

[DaveSimmons]

Ghost is discussed often in the Software forum. But no, Ghost and Drive Image basically skip over the unused space if you turn on compression -- instead of storing 100 GB of 000...000 they just store (it's zeros!)(how many = 100 GB).

Ghost, DIM are easier to use if you set up your drive as 2+ partitions (or if you have 2 drives) since then you can write the image of C: to a disk file on D:.

 

[buleyb]

I was under the impression (and experience tells me) that compression only works on compressing data files. Empty areas are never stored, as they are marked in the partition tables.

 

[Sid59]

empty hdd space is transparent. it doesn't do anything with it. that's why you can lay a ghost image onto any size hdd and come out gravy.

 

[htne]

Speaking from experience: A clean install of XP Pro SP1, with Office 2003 and a few other smaller apps, usually takes 3 cdrs in Ghost. Definitely worth while doing. The recommendation to create two partitions on your hard drive, and use the second partition to store your Ghost image, is a good idea also.

 

[fslove]

With hard drives so cheap these days THE best way to do it (which I have been doing for over 10 years) is to get a second hard drive and ghost the freshly installed drive to that new HD and take is out and store it somewhere. Then in case of an emergency you can put that HD in and use it while you replace or return the defective drive. Backing up to CD's & DVD's is great (and I would do that as well as the HD way) but if you have no HD to restore the CD/DVD's it doesn't much help! Just grab a 60-80GB HD on sale and use it (so as your fresh installs grow in size you are covered.

 

[charlie21]

Norton Ghost is the name of the product you're looking for. The software includes tutorials which will walk you through every step of the process.

Depending on how many apps you have to install, you could probably get away with a 2-3 CD backup. I just built a computer for my parents, and with Windows 2000, all service packs & updates, drivers, and AVG anti-virus, it came out to just one CD. This was on a 40 GB partition.

You could create 2 partitions, and use one of them used to store your backup image. But if your hard drive fails, your image goes with it. Keep a backup on CDR's, for peace of mind.

 

[Jeff H]

BimmerGuy330, you'll want to pick up an OEM copy of Norton Systemworks Pro 2003. It has a copy of Ghost 2003 on it, and that version will allow you to image your clean install of XP to either a second partition, CD-R's, or a second HD. fslove has a good suggestion to ghost over an image to a second HD. I've also been doing that, and last spring my installed HD started making funny noises. I was able to swap out that drive w/ a second drive with the image on it, and not skip a beat. When Newegg RMA'ed my drive I ghosted the image over to that drive.

Make very sure you get Systemworks Pro, as the regular version does not include Ghost. And, make sure it's 2003 as 2002 had issues w/ restoring an XP image (if I recall correctly, if not I'm sure someone will straighten me out). FWIW I got my copy from Directron.com for $12.

 

[Wooster]

What you can do is sysprep it, after the OS installation. Use Ghost in command prompt and cut the image into 695MB each, in order to fit on CDRs. Use the following ghost command in command prompt.

ghost -auto -split=695 -z9

Please be sure to have spare partition for image temporary storage. Or you can do it through network.

I use ghost image every three months, in order to keep the fresh install. Perfect for restore.

 

[alexruiz]

Well, thefolks have pointed you in the right direction :wine:

I am going to add a few comments:

- Get systemworks 2003 Pro OEM (includes Ghost 2003) Ghost 2003 allows to write the images to NTFs partitions.
- I partition my hard drive in 2 partitions, one for the applications, one for the Ghost images. After I make my partition image, I burn it to CDs as backup, but I keep it also in the hard drive. If I want to restore, it is waaay faster doing it from the hard drive than from CDs. CDs are used in case the hard drive gets bad.....
- I make my images as "partition to image" to the second partition, and burn them to CD using Nero or something similar. Burning directly from ghost is much slower (a modern hard drive can backup a partition at speeds of 800 MB/minute if writing to another partition/hard drive)
- I use the switches -auto -fro -span -split=690 -ffi -crcignore -fdsz split to span the image in 690 MB chunks, auto for autonamming the spans, fro to force the cloning even if errors are found, ffi to use direct IDE access, crcignore to forget about crc errors and make the image anyway, and finally, fdsz to clear the signature bytes (very helpful to make partition images)...

It is like insurance..... you never get worried about having to reconfigure everything.


Alex

 

[alexruiz]

Originally posted by: Wooster
What you can do is sysprep it, after the OS installation. Use Ghost in command prompt and cut the image into 695MB each, in order to fit on CDRs. Use the following ghost command in command prompt.

ghost -auto -split=695 -z9

Please be sure to have spare partition for image temporary storage. Or you can do it through network.

I use ghost image every three months, in order to keep the fresh install. Perfect for restore.

Hey, what is the purpose of the switch -z9? I would like to know

 

[poppyq]

Originally posted by: Sid59
empty hdd space is transparent. it doesn't do anything with it. that's why you can lay a ghost image onto any size hdd and come out gravy.

There are certain command parameters you can use to include the empty space (I deal with images all day from various software) but by default these are not enabled so it doesn't include the empty space.

 

[bernse]

If you ghost onto a seperate HD, should it be on its own partition on that drive or is that necessary?
IE - Should you make a 4GB partition just for Ghost on it?

 

[Wooster]

Hey, what is the purpose of the switch -z9? I would like to know

9 = maximum compression but slow
1 = low compression but fast

 

[SUOrangeman]

The Ghost image itself is a file (or series of files). The reason why folks are saying you'll need two partitions or a second drive is that you must have a place to actually save the image. You can't necessarily save the image on the same partition you intend to "ghost."

Personally, I've never had any luck with sysprep. You you are only doing your PC, it's probably not even necessary to use sysprep. If you want a very generic image, try to install your system with little to no drivers at all. Get to a point where you want to image and delete all remaining hardware from the Device Manager (assuming Windows here, of course). Whenever you restore from than image, it will detect all of the hardware (may take a reboot or three to complete) and you won't have any old drivers to removed unless they're in the OS itself.

-SUO

 

[alexruiz]

Originally posted by: SUOrangeman
The Ghost image itself is a file (or series of files). The reason why folks are saying you'll need two partitions or a second drive is that you must have a place to actually save the image. You can't necessarily save the image on the same partition you intend to "ghost."

Personally, I've never had any luck with sysprep. You you are only doing your PC, it's probably not even necessary to use sysprep. If you want a very generic image, try to install your system with little to no drivers at all. Get to a point where you want to image and delete all remaining hardware from the Device Manager (assuming Windows here, of course). Whenever you restore from than image, it will detect all of the hardware (may take a reboot or three to complete) and you won't have any old drivers to removed unless they're in the OS itself.

-SUO

Does it work? Sounds like a great advice.
Have you tried it in 2 different computers?

Thanks

 

[alexruiz]

Originally posted by: Wooster

Hey, what is the purpose of the switch -z9? I would like to know

9 = maximum compression but slow
1 = low compression but fast

Thank you.

I usually select "fast compress"... it yields aprox 1050 MB of data per 690 MB chunk.....

 

[SUOrangeman]

alexruiz, I've only gone from one nForce2 board to another. I haven't had a chance to try it on another x86 system. I should note that you need to make sure you've got the default IDE controller driver is used before deleting all of the drivers.

-SUO

 

[ROcHE]

You might want to try Acronis True Image it's pretty good.

 

[fslove]

Originally posted by: SUOrangeman
The Ghost image itself is a file (or series of files). The reason why folks are saying you'll need two partitions or a second drive is that you must have a place to actually save the image. You can't necessarily save the image on the same partition you intend to "ghost."

Personally, I've never had any luck with sysprep. You you are only doing your PC, it's probably not even necessary to use sysprep. If you want a very generic image, try to install your system with little to no drivers at all. Get to a point where you want to image and delete all remaining hardware from the Device Manager (assuming Windows here, of course). Whenever you restore from than image, it will detect all of the hardware (may take a reboot or three to complete) and you won't have any old drivers to removed unless they're in the OS itself.

-SUO

If you try to use this ghost backup on a different computer that is a lot different hardwarewise then the one you did the intial install you will be wasting your time if it's WinXP or 2003 as those OS's will basically require a whole new install as the activation feature will NOT allow this because of the different hardware compared to what the hardware HASH file has recorded.

 

[buleyb]

Originally posted by: alexruiz

Originally posted by: Wooster

Hey, what is the purpose of the switch -z9? I would like to know

9 = maximum compression but slow
1 = low compression but fast

Thank you.

I usually select "fast compress"... it yields aprox 1050 MB of data per 690 MB chunk.....

This is entirely dependent on what you are compressing (ie, a partition full of MP3s, ZIPs, and old compressed ghost images will yield you maybe 1-2%)

 

[alexruiz]

Originally posted by: buleyb

Originally posted by: alexruiz

Originally posted by: Wooster

Hey, what is the purpose of the switch -z9? I would like to know

9 = maximum compression but slow
1 = low compression but fast

Thank you.

I usually select "fast compress"... it yields aprox 1050 MB of data per 690 MB chunk.....

This is entirely dependent on what you are compressing (ie, a partition full of MP3s, ZIPs, and old compressed ghost images will yield you maybe 1-2%)

I totally agree, that is why I wrote the "aprox" in my post...

It yields the aprox that I posted for the partition with windows and programs..... I tried once to backup my data partition using max compression (aprox 1 GB of data) and the spans were 690 MB and 320 Mb......

 

[Dulanic]

It has been a while since I used Ghost... does it support DVD-R/RW drives yet? Think Id like to backup a fresh install to have, but it took up way too many CDRs for me with all the software I want on it.

 

[Wooster]

does it support DVD-R/RW drives yet?

I believe Ghost doesn't have build-in burning software. You can use Nero and burn it on DVD using bootable header.

 

[thatsright]

I know a few folks may shout me down here, but hey I thought I'd mention it nonetheless:

1. Partitioning is fine ONLY if your HD doesn't fail. Because you can have as many partitions you want, but if the physical drive goes belly up then you loose all partitions. I use two physical disks and I put all of my Backup stuff on my Maxtor 80Giger and my O/S and Apps stuff is on Drive 0: my Western Digital drive that I bought in May 120Gig 8MB SE. I never back up any of my Games or Kazaa stuff

2. What about the included XP Pro Backup Utility? True it's not that advanced or fully featured, but it's free for me and does the job nicely. At first back in July when I first ran the Backup utility, I would just do a COPY operation, copying every file on the C: drive. I did this a few times after installing major drivers and apps and then quickly realized I was going to rapidly run out of space on my 40 backup partition, when each backup file was about 7-11Gig's. So now I just do incremental backups, which is a lot quicker and more manageable in file size. To do a incremental backup of 2 1/2 Gigs took about 5 minutes.

New QUESTION: Anyone know does the XP Backup Utility support compression? I'm backing up from one drive to another, so I'm not sure if this would be Software or Hardware compression? If I can do it, how good is the compressions: would the XP utility take a 5Gig backup and compress it down to 3 or 4Gig's?

Well if anyone can answer that question, I'd like to know Thanks all.