Norton Ghost 2003 question

[Muse]

Ghost is the only HD/partition imaging software I've used. Works nicely, but has limitations. I want to be able to make images of a laptop HD or its boot partition (to either a 2nd HD in an optical drive mounted caddy or a USB connected external HD) so that I can recover from a HD failure (once burned twice shy - I had one over the weekend. ).

I tried restoring a laptop HD image made with Norton Ghost 2003 to a larger laptop HD, but it failed (I'd made the image, saving it to a USB connected external HD, but the restore to a different larger HD in the laptop failed). Just how much a match does the replacement HD have to be? Does it have to be the same actual HD?

 

[Dahak]

not really no, but usually what happens is the boot info may not be stored on the main partition that windows is on.
I know lenovos/thinkpads where particularly picky, that they even have a download on the website to fix boot info / rescue and recovery.

What sort of error is it giving? Sometime a simple fixboot or fixmbr off the an xp install cd could fix some of it.

the other thing you could do is use the -ib switch to image the boot info as well.

 

[Auric]

If running the GUI manually then look under Options - Image/Tape tab for such switches.

 

[Ben]

The new version of Norton Ghost (15) works well. Many people also like Acronis, which also works well. I've used both and have good results with both.

Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

I use Norton because it will automatically delete old images after creating new ones. Last time I checked, Acronis couldn't do that, but they may have added it by now.

 

[Emulex]

ghost15 is BESR2010 which has nothing todo with ghost 2003. totally different product with same name.

besr2010 deletes old images AFTER successfully writing a new one (COPY ON WRITE). which is very important if you have a catastrophic disk failure

 

[bruceb]

If you want to migrate a working hard drive to a larger one, use the Clone Function in Ghost to do it. After you are done and swap the drives, it will boot right up. One way is to set the drive to the same size as the old, restore it, then expand the partition size.
Also see this other link for a workaround

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?t=162021