Will Norton Ghost make a drive image?

[jsteph]

Hi,
What I want to do is create an image of my current main harddrive on a new, separate drive. The purpose is so that if the current drive crashes, I can simply plug in the new drive and go as if nothing happened.

I'm well aware that any files, data, blah, blah that happened since the time I made the image will be lost, and that's fine. I just don't want to have to reinstall all of my programs, etc, music licenses, etc, etc.

Is Ghost the tool? I'd heard that it's not as easy as just copying all files from one drive to the next-something about OS files and the sector in which they exist.
Thanks,
--Jim

 

[gsxr600k1]

Norton Ghost will backup the entire hard drisk or partition. Make sure your hard drive pin configuration is the same. It must be with the same hardware plus or minus. you can change some stuff ie video card, sound card, network card, but your hard drive controller must be the same.

Make sure that the other harddrive that you are ghosting to is not formatted with NTFS.

I do the same thing for my personal system. It is almost like a restore CD from the manufacture.

 

[nsantin]

I use ghost 10 for all our imaging, never had a problem with NTFS drives. In fact I store all of our laptop base images on the server which is NTFS.

It is very easy to use, select the backup option, select the drive to backup, select where to put the file(s), then goto lunch and your done.

However, if you are trying to image a server OS then you need a much more expense version, the "basic" one doesn't support servers.

 

[Santei]

as far as i understood u are looking for backup software and haven't purchased it yet, but have found Ghost. I
just wanted to discredit the myth of being Ghost best backup software and gave allternative version,which is worth discussing at least.
Say True Image product, which is more cheap and save than ghost. so why to spend more?
here is link where those two (ghost and ATI) are compared.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/drive-imaging-reviews.htm

hope this will help you.

 

[jsteph]

Thanks all,
I found the option in Ghost to image the hardrive, and I was able to image an NTFS drive to another blank NTFS drive, and it worked perfectly. I shut the machine down, yanked the original C: drive, and put the ghosted image in and...

...very important--in the registry I had to go to HKLM\System\MountedDevices\
...then go to the value \DosDevices\C: and change the hex value to the value under \DosDevices\E:, which was previously the ghosted drive. Otherwise the system will log off instantly as soon as you type in password and log in.

Then everything booted perfectly.
--Jim

 

[waitingtohear]

Jim,

I'm confused. How did you get into the registry to make the changes if you couldn't get into the system due to the logging off situation? I've got the same issue and don't understand how you got onto the new ghosted drive. Please explain....

 

[jsteph]

I used Remote registry, once the machine is at the logon prompt, you can connect to the registry from another machine, assuming you have a network.

I'm not sure if remote registry is enabled by default or not, but I always enable mine for just such an occasion...not that I forsaw this exact situation, but I always want to have some sort of side or back door to make emergency structural changes like that if some registry hack I try goes bad.
--Jim

 

[digsmann]

Dear All,

Good Day.
How do i make new Norton Ghost Floppy Disk ? So that i could make Image of my hard drive to same other machine.

Bunch of Thanks,
Digu

 

[jsteph]

It's been a while since I've done ghost--but I think that when you run the ghost program it leads you to where you make the floppy, which is basically a boot disk that will give you access to the source and destination drives. It should be part of the ghost process or a menu item in the user-interface.
--Jim