Question for those of you who have ever used GHOST

[Mears]

Just have a few questions. I'm gonna point out what I think and then let me know if I'm wrong.

1. Boot off a GHOST boot disc and backup whatever drive or partition you want. If you want to be able to burn onto cds, you need to alter the autoexec on the bootdisc to split at some point below 650 or something.

2. To load up image, just boot off floppy and then use the cds as the image.

Assuming those statements are correct, what would happen if for some reason you lost everything on your harddrive. Would you still be able to install by using the bootdisc or would you have to reinstall your OS and then GHOST again and then boot off the floppy?

 

[stultus]

Heeey, what program will let you boot off of a CD that has a ghost image on it? I want me some of that. I'm a new convert to ghost from Drive Image Pro...

If your drive gets hosed, all you need is the boot disk and the image. you woulnd not need to reinstall the OS. (In fact, that is the whole reason I use ghost.)

 

[Sugadaddy]

Check this page, they show you how to create images that will fit on CD, and also show how you can create a bootable CD with your image on it.

It's pretty easy to do. If my computer screws up, I just reformat my main partition, put in the CD, and I'm back in less than 5 minutes

 

[Auric]

When creating a backup image it is quicker to just boot to DOS on the HDD and run Ghost from a partition not being imaged. Use a batch file to backup to CD's with splitting. Check your docs for switch info. I believe there are also Ghost/CD burner combo software proggies available, at least under the Plextor brand that make it simpler for the average Jane.

An example would be "dumpc.bat" to image a Win98 OS partition (C) to (D) with high compression and splitting for 80m CD's

d:\ghost\ghostpe.exe -clone,mode=pdump,src=1:1,dst=d:\win98.gho -z9 -split=698 -autoname


No special bootdisc is required for recovery from total failure. A Win98 "Startup" floppy with CD support does the trick. Put Ghost and maybe gdisk and Partition Magic on another. However, I like to leave a few MB (as in my batch file above) for Ghost and PM on the CD as it just makes sense. Making the CD bootable only takes another minute and produces a complete stand-alone recovery disc (or set of discs) without the need for nasty floppies.

 

[Zucchini]

Yup, best to keep your C: partition clean anyhow. No game installs/ media files, that way u can wipe/image easily. Clean windows with office appz with compression only takes about 400MB or so.. win2k a bit more. With most hd's nowdays you have enuph space to easily keep the images on a separate partition.

 

[Gepost]

I wanted to Ghost my C drive on my laptop to my second, D Drive partition. When I booted up and tried to image my C partition, the only option to save the image file to was A:. What's up with this? I have windows 2000 and NTFS. Is this causing my problem?

 

[Mears]

Ok, understand everything so far. So even if you lose the actual ghost program you will still be able to reinstall with the images, but do you have to reformat the HD again or will it be done automatically when uploading the images?

Edit...ok so I tried backing up(win2k) by using boot wizard to create a boot disc with cd-rom support. Used the command line switch to break up the file size and created it. Everything went ok. Then when I tried booting from it, I got all kinds of errors and it bailed on me. I have Ghost 2001 so it should be compatible with win2k.

 

[Mears]

Just retried and here is a rundown of some errors. Maybe someone can figure something out of this mess.

Unable to find any AIC-7890/91
ASPI842.SYS Install Failed

.
.
.
"Another error or two almost identical to the above"
.
.
.
Adaptec ASPI dev driver NA
CD-Rom drive not loaded: no valid adaptect host adapter
.
.
.
"few other things about loading my drives"
.
.
.
Critical Error: Abort, Retry, Fail:

Sounds to me like my disc isn't compatible with win2k. All I did was use boot wizard. Is there something I'm missing here. I've heard of ASPI problems with Win2k. Is there something that I might be able to download to fix this?

 

[Mears]

Do you guys think it is possible that using the boot wizard is making my disc a win9x boot disk since win2k boot disks span four floppies? If so, how would I go about fixing this?

 

[stultus]

No, for the most part you will get a lot of errors off of the book disk. This is because it is trying to load boot drivers for every device it can think of. Only one of them will be yours, so all the rest fail. The "Critical Error" is not something that you should be getting, however. that sounds like your floppy disk has a bad sector on it. Use a different floppy.

No, it is not making a Win9x disk. the one that it makes works just fine with Win2k.

 

[Mears]

Well the only thing that really worried me about the driver errors was that the cd-rom driver was not even loaded.

 

[Hobbes28]

Here is the way Ghost 2001 works (I bought Norton Systemworks Pro 2001 for $14.99 and Ghost 2001 comes with it):

Ghost will not image to another partition on the SAME drive, you can however image to a partition on another Hard Drive. Makes sense, if your drive crashes you lose your image.

I don't think you can image just a partition, I think you can only image the whole drive. If you can choose just a single partition I'd like to know how.

Ghost will image directly to CD-R(W)s and make them bootable if so desired. I do this all the time. You have to have your CD-R(W) on either the primary or secondary IDE channel on the mobo and have a generic CR-ROM driver loaded at boot (I use Oak Technologies) so DOS can see your CD-R(W). You also have to select a couple of options before you start in Ghost (Spanning and Autoname) so that Ghost can span mutiple CD-R(W)s. It also gives you the option of making these image CDs bootable provided you have a bootable disk in Drive A: (which in my case I do because everything that is necessary for this process is on my boot disk).

It truely is a very simple process and I think once you have everything set up you probably won't use anything else.

Good luck to ya...

 

[stultus]

I respectfully disagree with Hobbes28. I, too, have Norton Systemworks 2001, and I've used Ghost off of it to image to a different partition on the same drive. I didn't see any options for a direct-to-CDR, though. I guess I wasn't looking.

 

[huanaku]

The last image I made was to a cd... Did it a few weeks back though

 

[Auric]

I've been using Ghost for years and it sure can image a partition to the same drive. I have 2001 but never installed it, maybe the CDR writing is a reason to. I guess Symantec licensed Plextor before releasing it themselves.