'Saving' a pc in its current state

[noellees1]

hi,
I have a windows xp pc now working as it should be all the stuff i want is installed on it.
However not so long ago i had to reformat the whole machine using lots of data and time to directX courruption.
Anyway back to the matter i am using about 30gbs of an 80gb drive. What i would like to do is save the current pc configuration so if it goes wrong again i have it on disk to shove in and go.
Is this a job for something like ghost

 

[wolluf]

ghost would certainly do it - I'd put the ghost image elsewhere though (if its on same drive & drive fails....)

 

[mcall]

absolutely ghost. I use ghost enterprise and can have a system back up and running in minutes

 

[noellees1]

so you advise getting a second harddrive and save the image to that? How do i restore if it goes wrong etc? not that i hope it will but you know how reliable systems can be
Does ghost compress? I.e 40gbs data into a smaller amount or what?

 

[wolluf]

Another drive is a reasonable idea (another would be a DVD writer - creating the image over several disks). You can restore it from a ghost boot floppy. Ghost can compress when creating images (get no compression, fast compression and high compression - slower execution options). How much it compresses depends on what the data is (eg, mp3 & jpeg files are already compressed, so wouldn't gain much. Document files on the other hand are generally highly compressible. Other types in between).

 

[noellees1]

I prefer the second hdd option i think i will just get a small one and have it all on that
Cheers

 

[mcall]

second HD good idea. I carry around an 80gb external maxtor with my images. CD option cheaper and won't crash but takes a while to accomplish. Also reload from external Hd much faster. But as I said cd route cheaper ($3-$5 US versus $200-$300 US)

 

[Rico898]

I have Ghost 2003 on my laptop and I can't get it to create am image on my USB external hard drive. Any Ideas

 

[mcall]

what kind of error are you getting? Is usb drive seen inside Ghost 2003? If ghost crashes during image dump, try loadiing ghost with command line option -fni