Norton Ghost 2003

[mitchafi]

1) Will the backup I make for a certain harddrive include all of that drive's registry entries, installed programs, etc...?

2) If I was to backup an image of my OS partition, write zero's to the drive, and then ghost the image back on to the drive, would it make the drive any faster, or would I just be reinstalling the same junk I just formatted.

3) Will Ghost keep my SATA drivers for my raptor?

4) If I can think of anything else I'll add it

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

ghosting a hard disk copies EVERYTHING exactly as it was, nothing different. you will have all the same registry entrys obviously,and formating as you described would be useless unless you want to get rid of the partitions then ghost the stuff back on.you'd see no increase in performance unless you have the paritions setup in such a manner that the OS is currently on the inner section of the hard drive platters and you move it to the outside.

 

[mitchafi]

So, is having the OS on the inner section a bad thing? It is the first partion on my drive, followed by a games/programs partition, and a 2 gig swap file partition. What is optimal here?

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

heres a nice little informative web site for you to read about, its mainly simple physics,and the performance hit generally isn't large but can be noticable depending on the situation.

when you say swap, i asume you use linux? if so then linux is generally very friendly with allowing one to pick what area of the platter to pick for partitions based on sector numbers. i honestly couldn't comment on how to do so with windows though.

 

[mitchafi]

No, I don't have linux. It's my paging file/virtual memory for xp.

 

[mitchafi]

Well based on that article, I did it right, my OS partition was the first one I made, making it the outermost and therefore the fastest.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

how much ram do you have? page filing is generally intensively used by windows and therefore merits a outter parition also.

 

[yougotdeals]

Originally posted by: mitchafi
So, is having the OS on the inner section a bad thing? It is the first partion on my drive, followed by a games/programs partition, and a 2 gig swap file partition. What is optimal here?

I use a seperate drive on my computer for the swap file. That's just me though.

That's assuming you have another drive.

 

[mitchafi]

So perhaps I'll lose the partition I use for just the swap file and combine it with the OS partition.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

that sounds like the best setup for your needs