how the heck do you use norton ghost?

[Twista]

I put it on a cd but 20gb of space took like 5 cds so how the heck do you ghost a 100gb hdd on a cd rw drive. Do you guys use a dvd burner?

 

[derekblankmccoy]

Ghost is meant to make hard drive images for freshly installed systems with whatever software is needed. Lets say WinXP with Office, burning software, multimedia software and any other goodies will take up 2 cds. It does not involve any type of compression at all.

It wanst meant to make images of entire hard drives saturated with useless crap. Completely the opposite, its meant for you to install a fresh system image quickly -after your hard drive has been saturated with useless crap and youve backed up your important stuff.

I would backup, do a fresh install of your OS, install whatever software you use, and run ghost for an image. Store it safely in a coupole of CDs, and after a year, bring them out for spring cleanup.

 

[Twista]

i installed my os yesterday morin' and its got all the right apps now. Do i run ghost and tell it to make a image of my 30gbhdd or what?

 

[derekblankmccoy]

Damn, if the image is 20GB, you must have installed a shitload of programs.
My image has XP, office, Nero, Trillian, codecs, drivers, media players, SETI, SmartFTP, Photoshop, Panda AV, and some little useful programs, and it takes up 2 CDs.

You must have installed complete suites from Adobe, Macromedia, and Corel ontop of what I have to get an image that big

 

[Caanon]

Originally posted by: derekblankmccoy

It wanst meant to make images of entire hard drives saturated with useless crap. Completely the opposite, its meant for you to install a fresh system image quickly -after your hard drive has been saturated with useless crap and youve backed up your important stuff.

Wasn't meant to....but it works good....having 2 hard drives is nice for backing up =)

 

[Twista]

well i selected C: drive for my image.. how do i just select my windows and programs than.

Am i doing this right? http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/twista/ru.JPG

 

[0roo0roo]

bad bad boy. one should keep os/apps partition ~7gb. and keep games and all other useless media nonsense off it. after installing windows, office/appz, all critial updates, sp1 etc, you make a compresed ghost image of this partition. this ends up around 600mb compresed with office etc. make sure to turn off hibernation or else windows leaves a file the size of your ram on your c: that gets backed up too. thats bad

now you have a ghost image that saves you hours and hours of installation headaches if you ever need to revert to clean windows.

with such a partition its also easy to backup windows partition temporariliy whenever your going to do something risky etc, and you want to have peace of mind.

i just keep the ghost image on another partition or another drive since its so small. restoring image takes very little time.

you can repartition a filled drive with partition magic. else your data gets lost with repartition.


such an os partition makes things easier anyways if you have to format and dont' want to lose a buncha your stuff.

 

[derekblankmccoy]

OOOOOHHHHH
Youre using the windows GUI thingie. I thought you were using the actual ghost program that does the real work

First, tell me exactly what you want to do and for what reason.

Need to know:
- size of each disk and partition
- Whats on each disk and partition
- what you want to make an image of

I see you have music folders, you dont want music or documents on your image

 

[Twista]

Alright i turned off hib and my c drive is only 3.86gb now how many cds would that take to backup? I only have 700mb cd rws, so im guess 6 cds?

my setup is confusing from the pic i posted. Music is on the D: with other media and saved website and pics and the program file on D: is not really my program file folder. What im trying to do is ghost the disk so i can use it to do a fresh of windows and it will have all my programs already on it.

Thanks, something like you mention in your 1st post. Btw what ghost are you talking about? Is the gui one worse?

actual ghost program that does the real work. thats the one i guess in need ;-

 

[derekblankmccoy]

There is absolutely no reason your image should be more than 2 cds.
You should only make an image of your primary drive with the following:
- OS
- Settings
- Drivers
- Essential Programs
- Other ESSENTIAL stuff

No music, no games, no docs, no multimedia, no useless crap.

The GUI version is just a mini app that sets up the actual ghost program that does the real work. Its a small program that measures half a meg and is DOS based.

 

[Twista]

Originally posted by: derekblankmccoy
There is absolutely no reason your image should be more than 2 cds.
You should only make an image of your primary drive with the following:
- OS
- Settings
- Drivers
- Essential Programs
- Other ESSENTIAL stuff

No music, no games, no docs, no multimedia, no useless crap.

My hdd is 30gb and its using only 3gb and heres a pic.

 

[derekblankmccoy]

Ok, seems fair enough, but 3 gigs is a bit big for a fresh install, what programs are in there?

EDIT: Actually it seems allright. Make an image of your C drive and tell it to make cd images of it. Hopefully its no more than 3 cds.

 

[Twista]

Text
This is a fresh instal with avg and firewall and btw if you are goigng by your xp installtion... which i dont use.
Did you use a old ghost or the 2003?

/edit 3.45gb now with disk clean up.

 

[derekblankmccoy]

I see the problem.
Your docs and settings folder is inmense. I put my docs in a separate drive. If you have it on the same drive as your OS, it defeats the purpose of storing them in a secure place. Move your docs to another drive and tell windows where it is by right clicking on the my documents folder and changing the target.
Also your Nvidia folder is big too. I actually dont have that folder in my pc and i have a geforce.

When you do that, do a disk cleanup, and get rid of anything temporary and empty the recycle bin. Also remove every restore point except the last one.

Ghost hasnt changed for over 5 years. It is still the same littel program it was before, except they made a windows GUI for user friendliness. The actual program is no harder tu use, even though its DOS, it has a GUI and is very user friendly. It should be in your ghost folder and its ghostpe.exe

 

[0roo0roo]

use a freeware program called treesize to help cleaning up drives. shows size of directories and stuff, very nie to find junk files. documents only would compress quite well.

 

[Sid59]

ghost does compress .. sometimes as much as 50% of the USED drive space.

XP + SP1 + Updates comes out to be around 2 GIGs. Toss in some apps, you have yourself a nice sized image.

I love my dvd burner. made a bootable dvd disc with ghost.exe on it and 2 different Ghost images. Have a much better FULL install now. If i get time, imma Ghost this with ALL my apps in place and will be able to fit it on a single DVD - R

 

[Twista]

/EDIT: Turned off pagefile and running on all ram till ghost is over and now im @ 1.76gb Ghost says appr. size of disk is 1202Mb i guess compressed.
/edit my hdd is now down to 2.88GB
MY pagefile is over 1gb! Should i turn off pf for this ghost than back on i got over 512mb ram but i use it anyway.
Text

Originally posted by: Sid59
ghost does compress .. sometimes as much as 50% of the USED drive space.

XP + SP1 + Updates comes out to be around 2 GIGs. Toss in some apps, you have yourself a nice sized image.

I love my dvd burner. made a bootable dvd disc with ghost.exe on it and 2 different Ghost images. Have a much better FULL install now. If i get time, imma Ghost this with ALL my apps in place and will be able to fit it on a single DVD - R

You suck ;p

 

[Twista]

Done.. i created it with two cds and i got my drive down to 1.6gb and now its back over 2.60gb b/c i got pagefile and system restore.. Thanks guys.

 

[0roo0roo]

i don't think ghost really includes the page file, or else my ghost images withclean windows xp sp 1 all updates office suite, norton apps and other apps would never compress to 600~mb. only hiberantion file hurts.

 

[Twista]

I turned off pf and went down 1gb and my os is not windows xp or windows xp sp1 or windows 2000 sp4. So i guess i shouldnt/us be compairing this to xp size. MY windows folder is 1.45gb by its self.

 

[Twista]

crazy question what if someone keep doing this after there windows expire after 130 days.. wouldnt that be illigel and can this be only installed on one pc? I have no intention to do this just wondering and using mine for whenever i need to format. one cool thing is now i can format and come back a fully good system with my fav. skin already installed which is
Text

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: Twista
I turned off pf and went down 1gb and my os is not windows xp or windows xp sp1 or windows 2003 sp4. So i guess i shouldnt/us be compairing this to xp size. MY windows folder is 1.45gb by its self.

what os do you use? all previous versions of windows take even less hd space for ghost images, i've done a lot of ghost imaging win98 is teenie. 2k slightly bigger.

 

[Twista]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo

Originally posted by: Twista
I turned off pf and went down 1gb and my os is not windows xp or windows xp sp1 or windows 2003 sp4. So i guess i shouldnt/us be compairing this to xp size. MY windows folder is 1.45gb by its self.

what os do you use? all previous versions of windows take even less hd space for ghost images, i've done a lot of ghost imaging win98 is teenie. 2k slightly bigger.

win 2003 server but i guess its about the same as xp.

 

[georgeg]

I've been following this thread for awhile and I've looked at the users manual for Ghost. I have a question... My problem is I've done a clean install of Win XP Pro and repeated attempts to install SP1 have endedin system lockups that keep my computer from booting up into windows. I'd like to do a backup of a clean install if restoring from the backup would be quicker than doing a fresh install. The Ghost manual isn't clear on whether I can burn a disk image onto CD-R, boot from that and reinstall the operating system and be off and running. They talk about making a boot floppy but they also say you don't need a recovery boot disk if you save the image to CD. Is that correct? Can I just boot off the CD and restore my corrupted windows files?

 

[Sid59]

i have an image of fresh install .. only takes 10-15 minutes (hardware depends) to get it back.

ghost and dump the image to another hdd or parition.
from here you can split the ghost image (if it's bigger than 700MBs) and have a disc bootable and contain ghost.exe

or ..

keep ghost and the ghost image on SMALL fat32 partition or ntfs, depending on which ghost version you have. boot into dos and execute ghost.exe and reload the image.