Win2K Ghost mystery

[ampal]

I have been reading some postings about Ghost and Win2K, and I would like to clear things up in my mind.

What I would like to do is put a second hard drive in each of our critical work stations (Win2K,4 of them total) use the second drive to have a ghost image of the original drive. Then if there is problems with the original drive, I can just swap the drives, and the machine is up and running. I can worry about the other drive later. Is it as simple as I make it sound?

But I keep reading about sid's and cleaning this file out and hardware changes. I haven't bought Ghost yet so maybe there is something better to use??

Thanks in advance for your help.
Mike

 

[bcastner]

That is not the purpose of Ghost, at least at the moment. See if the new version of Drive Image comes closer to the hot swap you are trying to achieve.

 

[Dillinger99]

I typically back up my hard drive twice a week to a separate hard drive with Drive Image 5.0's Quickimage feature. With it, I can schedule a backup to occur at night while my machine as at the Ctrl+Alt+Del prompt. It re-boots itself into DOS and creates the image. When it finishes, it re-boots itself again and returns to the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen. It's saved me a ton of trouble more than once.

 

[ampal]

Will Drive image work with different types of hard drives. And if I image a hard drive could it be used in a different machine. So if I setup one computer, install software needed, image the drive onto a different hard drive, Then take that hard drive to a different machine it will boot and run. I do realize I may have to change some drivers to get some devices working.

Mike

 

[bcastner]

ampal,

There are options to allow a 'bare metal' use of an image under Drive Image 7 and other programs.

Just be careful initially in specifying what sort of image you want: in your situation it sounds as if an incremental image of some type is needed.

 

[MOSSOP]

Another one to try is PowerQuest V2i - I've used it and it is brilliant. Save the system to an image file on another harddrive or partition and if you need to restore, boot from PowerQuest CD and it loads network protocols and a mini explorer and you browse back to the image file and restore. The newest version has a scheduled backup in it so you could schedule backups every night if there were constant config changes. It backs up on the fly.

http://www.powerquest.com/v2i/protector/

 

[euston]

Win2000 lacks the system restore facility that XP possesses. So I use Ghost 2002 to effectively do a system save/restore and use a second HDD with 2 partitions: NTFS for page file and a Fat32 partition on which I write image files of the C drive. It's been a life saver on several occasions after unwise software installations of computer magazine cover disk free software (I can't resist them).

I don't care that it only works in DOS. The 20 minute save time allows for a nice leisurely cup of tea plus a refill. Ghost restores a nice tidy disk with MFT in the low disk addresses and system files nicely bunched together.