Ghosting hard drive or cloning hard drive?

[de8212]

I've used Ghost for a couple of years and have made images of my hard drives without any major issues but want to ask which is the best way to approach this problem.
Recently my wifes hard drive in her dell pc crashed. I have plans to get a new hard drive and replace it. In the mean time (before I actually buy the drive) can I just load XP onto an extra 10GB hard drive I have and then clone the drive over to the new drive?

I guess my quesiton is what is the difference in creating an image vs cloning?

 

[networkman]

Ghosting a drive and creating an image is great for backup purposes and the like.

"Cloning" a drive is usually done when you want to make one image and then clone it onto multiple machines, such as when you want to roll out all new machines to a school or library or such. Typically, assuming Windows, you'd use a utility like "Sysprep" to clean up the original configuration, wiping out user profiles and such but keeping all of the applications and drivers installed. You could even configure it to boot up already with the CD key in place and ready for a name and to be joined to a network. We use Ghost and Sysprep will all of our roll-outs to staff and public machines at my workplace.

 

[de8212]

I'm not at home now and I don't remember the options in ghost. I was just thinking there was a seperte option for doing a regular image (saving an image to a seperate partiotion or some form of media) and creating an image that will be used to do a hard drive swap.
Maybe I am just not thinking clearly. If I make the image of a fresh XP install, how do I restore it to the new drive? I was thinking there was an actual option that copied the drive over to the new drive? Is that not true?

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: de8212
I was thinking there was an actual option that copied the drive over to the new drive? Is that not true?

That is the cloning option. In Norton Ghost, that is apparently not as clear as it is in Acronis TrueImage. For cloning I always use a bootable CD prepared by TrueImage so that the Windows OS is not involved at all.

The main difference between imaging and cloning is placement of the data and the bootsector. A disk image puts it anywhere on any media that you choose. Cloning is a bit by bit copy of a hard drive to another harddrive that in effect duplicates the source drive. It is ready to use - an image is not necessarily ready to use.

Most OEMs have free cloning programs you can download. Some are brand specific.

 

[networkman]

I suppose it depends on how you created the image in the first place; every image I've created and restored has been fully functional and ready to use.

Perhaps a little clarification is in order here for the versions of Ghost being mentioned, as there are most certainly some options in newer ones not seen in the older ones. I'm Ghost 8.0 Enterprise both at work and at home(completely legit in both places). I know there are newer versions of Ghost available but I've not encountered any problems thus far that would require me to upgrade up to and including XPsp2.