Question about Norton's Ghost..

[jazzhound]

Hi

I have never attempted to do a Ghost of my hdd before but I am sorta in the know as to what it does, basic features anyways. Ive recently spent an inordinate about of time configuring winXP to be the way I'd like it to be, meaning installed all my programs, configured the desktop, icon, etc which requires alot of time and i"d like to save it so I can do a quick ghost over next time I need to format or for whatever reason.


so, when I ghost does it retain all my reg hacks? shell32.dll hacks?

thanks in advance.

 

[jlemieux]

Ghost will create an exact copy of the partition or drive you select.

 

[jazzhound]

How does it ghost a drive that's 10GB? Ive heard people say they've ghost their partition on a cd but what happens when your drive or partition is 10GB or more than a cds capacity?

 

[cleverhandle]

Well, first of all, Ghost doesn't include empty space in an image - so a 20GB drive with 8GB of stuff will create an 8GB image. Then, if you want to burn a CD image, it spans the image over several discs. Each part of the image contains a tag at the end which tells Ghost to ask for the next piece of the image. Pretty nifty. More commonly, people image their primary disc to a backup disc. Then, if the primary disc is 8GB out of 20, Ghost creates an 8GB image file on the backup disk's filesystem. This, by the way, is where some people overstate Ghost's problems with XP/NTFS. Ghost, being a DOS-based program, cannot write that 8GB image file on the backup's NTFS partition, because it can't read that disk's filesystem. It has no problems creating the image from the primary XP installation (because it copies the disk bit for bit), but it needs a FAT32 partition or CD's to store the image when it's created.

 

[Rob G.]

...just to add to what Clever said... DriveImage 5.0 will store an image file onto an NTFS partition quite happily. Ghost 2002 (the only one that works with XP NTFS) also prompts you for a licence code every time you restore or clone. Drive Image doesn't.