my experience using Ghost and XP

[bocamojo]

I recently had a hard drive start to go bad (clicking noise, followed by the PC locking up). It was sporadic, but you could definitely tell the hard drive wasn't going to last much longer. So, I had Norton Ghost 2003 installed, and created a Ghost image to another partition on the drive that was going bad. Then, I put in another spare drive into the system, set it up in the BIOS, booted up with a Ghost boot floppy, and imaged the new drive with all data from the old drive (selected From Image and browsed to the image file I created). I found that there is a little snag in this process for XP. The right way to handle this is once you've finished ghosting the new drive, turn off the PC, take out the old drive, and setup the new drive as the master (with jumpers... alternative to this would be using cable select, but I like to hard code things), and boot up. Once you do this, XP will recognize the new drive (detect hardware), and ask you to reboot. Once you reboot, you're good to go. You can put the old drive back in the system, as either the main drive (if you were just doing this to setup a backup drive) or as a slave / secondary drive (which you can reformat in XP). What you DO NOT want to do: Do not reboot the PC after the ghost process with both drives hooked up. If you do this, XP writes some sort of signature to the ghosted drive, and after that, you won't be able to boot up on this drive into XP. It will give you some errors (I don't remember what errors). Even in safe mode, you will not be able to finish booting into XP. So, just in case any of you are thinking about doing this, make sure you remember to take out the old drive before you boot up with the newly ghosted drive.

 

[tcsenter]

From the Ghost 2002 User Manual:

Warning: You should remove the second hard drive before you restart your computer. If you leave the second drive in the computer, damage can occur to both of the bootable operating systems.

Manuals kick butt.

 

[FoBoT]

i always image to network drives vs. local drives

 

[SaigonK]

Originally posted by: bocamojo
I recently had a hard drive start to go bad (clicking noise, followed by the PC locking up). It was sporadic, but you could definitely tell the hard drive wasn't going to last much longer. So, I had Norton Ghost 2003 installed, and created a Ghost image to another partition on the drive that was going bad. Then, I put in another spare drive into the system, set it up in the BIOS, booted up with a Ghost boot floppy, and imaged the new drive with all data from the old drive (selected From Image and browsed to the image file I created). I found that there is a little snag in this process for XP. The right way to handle this is once you've finished ghosting the new drive, turn off the PC, take out the old drive, and setup the new drive as the master (with jumpers... alternative to this would be using cable select, but I like to hard code things), and boot up. Once you do this, XP will recognize the new drive (detect hardware), and ask you to reboot. Once you reboot, you're good to go. You can put the old drive back in the system, as either the main drive (if you were just doing this to setup a backup drive) or as a slave / secondary drive (which you can reformat in XP). What you DO NOT want to do: Do not reboot the PC after the ghost process with both drives hooked up. If you do this, XP writes some sort of signature to the ghosted drive, and after that, you won't be able to boot up on this drive into XP. It will give you some errors (I don't remember what errors). Even in safe mode, you will not be able to finish booting into XP. So, just in case any of you are thinking about doing this, make sure you remember to take out the old drive before you boot up with the newly ghosted drive.

One thing I like about Norton Ghost 2003 is how they are using it as more of a backup tool than a recovery tool.
I like that when i decide to ghost, i can do everything from inside windows and then it reboots, no floppy or disc need, ghosts automatically and then i am done.

I also like the fact that you can now burn your images to DVD! I am setting up all my new systems i build with a base ghost image on a bootable DVD. Works great when the user calls and says my mahcine is so slow and spanked...backup your data...boot up on the dvd...back to a new OS.

 

[Slickone]

So you just have to remove one drive before rebooting, doesn't matter which one, correct?
It didn't use to be this way in Win9x, why does it do this in XP?
Does PQ Drive Image do this also?

 

[bocamojo]

Originally posted by: Slickone
So you just have to remove one drive before rebooting, doesn't matter which one, correct?
It didn't use to be this way in Win9x, why does it do this in XP?
Does PQ Drive Image do this also?

Slick, you should probably remove the old drive, to allow the new one to be booted up and have XP find the new drive. Once you've done that, and rebooted, then it doesn't matter which drive you put in your system, or whether you put both in.

 

[bocamojo]

Originally posted by: tcsenter
From the Ghost 2002 User Manual:

Warning: You should remove the second hard drive before you restart your computer. If you leave the second drive in the computer, damage can occur to both of the bootable operating systems.

Manuals kick butt.

Manuals are for sissies... Real men do it by trial and error. GHeesh...

 

[sak]

hey i dont know how obvious it is to you guys..but i did the exact same thing with ghost..but i didnt read that warning..but now i know..

btw ghost is an awesome program.

 

[D3xx]

Is there any way Ghost can write its image to a local NTFS volume?

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: D3xx
Is there any way Ghost can write its image to a local NTFS volume?

Ghost 2003 can read & write NTFS just fine.

 

[Muse]

... btw ghost is an awesome program.

Yeah, but don't think for a second that Symantec developed it. They bought a company that developed it.