Norton Ghost and Ghosting...

[TheVrolok]

What exactly does Ghosting do... been hearing bits and pieces about it, but I'm not familiar with it myself, what's it's purpose?

 

[bockie]

Norton Ghost allows you to make a duplicate copy of the drive.

I use it at work to upgrade my users hard drives. Let's say that have a 6.4 GB hard drive that is almost full. Instead of taking that new 10 GB hard drive and reinstalling the operating system, software, and data files, I use Norton Ghost to copy the data from the 6.4 GB hard drive to the 10 GB one. So instead of taking a day to reload everything, it only takes me about an hour to upgrade that individuals hard drive.

It can also be used if you are going to be rolling out several identical systems at once. You install everything on one system, the use Norton Ghost to duplicate or clone the drive over to the other systems.

 

[Castellan]

or partitions. There are several ideas that are useful with ghost. You can multicast images to multiple machines at once. Lots of stuff that is good in an enterprise environment, but not so useful at home 🙂 At home I do images of partitions and drives as backups.

 

[overmars]

There are other software brands other than Norton Ghost.

Image Cast IC3

Drive Image

These are probably two of the biggest alternatives to Norton Ghost. People like to claim that one is better than the other, but they all are pretty much the same. Some have faster transfer speeds in various environments, but that's about it.

 

[fargus]

Here's a neat little Ghost trick... when you've just formatted your drive, create a Ghost image of it. The file should be tiny enough to fit on the diskette with your Ghost executable file. Next time you want to format the drive, just restore the image. Presto- you've formatted your huge drive in 10 seconds flat!

 

[ajskydiver]

Hey fargus, that's a really good idea... I'll have to try that 🙂

 

[Antisocial Virge]

fargus
hahah thats a great idea. I usually just ghost overtop of my old data but that would be a neat trick 😀

 

[Zombie13]

That's the beaty of these forums - you learn stuff everyday. Fargus - awesome idea. I will use it tonight. I must have ghosted drives and partitions a hundred times, and ghosting a newly formatted hard-drive never occurred to me.

 

[Anubix]

Another imaging/cloning utility is DiskClone, forgot the manuf. You can determine the size of the images to make (650MB to burn to CD), it spans after that. It doesn't work well with NTFS. Like Ghost, it only makes images of used HDD sectors. For NTFS, it images the whole thing! One day I left it running and ended up with 5 650MB files! Aaagh!

 

[NesuD]

Ghost 2001 Now has support for cd/rw instead of having to image to another drive or drive partition you can write the image directly to the cd and make the cd bootable all at the same time. Been playing with it the last couple of days. Enable spanning to and it will automatically spanning if the image goes over the capacity of your cd.I currently have a 2.2 gig install imaged on 2 700 mb bootable cds using the high compression setting and still have room for around 100 megs on disk 2. This is a very nice utility.

 

[MTDEW]

Antisocial-Virge,
Am I wasting my time formatting b4 restoring my image?

 

[Rob G.]

You don't need to format before restoing an image.

 

[MightyMightyMe]

MTDEW: Yeah since you're overwriting the hard drive anyway you really don't need to, I've been using Ghost eversince NS2001 came out and i've never formated before Ghosting.

Ghost is also nice for dual boot systems as you don't have to reinstall 2 OSes in a worst case scenario. I love it I haven't had to reformat ever since I made my first image, probably won't have to till I upgrade to Whistler, oh sorry, excuse me Windows XP. I've used some other programs that did similar things but so far Ghost is the easiest for me