Laptop Harddrive backup

[msolheim]

I'm planning on reformating my laptop harddrive and reinstalling windows and programs.

I'd like to make a backup first. What is the fastest and most reliable way to make a backup of the harddrive? It only has one partition so everything I've read about using ghost says it won't work.

I can hook it into my lan but then what software do I use to make the backup across the network. Any suggestions would be great.

thanks
Mike

[reboot]

Why don't you just hook it up to the LAN, and copy the entire contents of the drive to another PC?
Why do you think that ghost won't work? It's designed to back up an entire partition.

[msolheim]

ghost won't allow you go make an image of partition and save it to the same partion and it won't allow you save it over a network. Atleast the dos version I have won't. Don't really want to spend some $70 for the windows version either.

[Statica]

Novastore is also good, but again good backup costs $$$

[HAL9000]

Use GHOST. Connect to a network, map a drive letter. Run GHOST from within Windows (there is no "windows version"), save the image to the mapped network drive. Don't know where you read the info on GHOST as this DOES work as I do it on a regular basis at work.



[Edited by HAL9000 on 03-23-2001 at 06:57 PM]

[msolheim]

How do I map a network drive while in dos?

[sedu]

I believe you need the corporate version of Ghost to image to a network drive, it a few bucks more than the personal edition.

[HAL9000]

NO... do EVERYTHING in Windows. Connect the laptop to the network. Boot the laptop and the destination computer into Windows. Map a drive on the laptop (we'll call it X:\). On the laptop, while in Windows, execute GHOST (it will need to be run in full screen DOS, not a DOS window). Save to an image file, drive letter X:\ will be available to send the image to. I have done this since GHOST Version 3.

[sedu]

Hal 9000,

My present version of Ghost 2000, 5.1d Personal Edition, has the following limitations as stated by Symantec:

"-Multicasting is not available.
-Images cannot be saved to or restored from network drives.
-The -BATCH and -SURE switches are not functional.

Because of the above limitations, Norton Ghost Personal Edition is
not suitable for rolling out multiple PCs or hard drives. If you
want to roll out multiple PCs or hard drives, you will need to
obtain the corporate edition of Norton Ghost to get those
features."

How did you get around these limitations to save to a network drive? It would be most helpful to know.

[HAL9000]

Then this I do not understand, that is the version that I am currently using (came with System Works 2000) and I just tried it on my home network and it worked fine. I've never done it this way, but maybe try the parallel port connection with ghost.

[Edited by HAL9000 on 03-24-2001 at 12:10 PM]

[msolheim]

Hal9000,
Thanks for the info.
I'm running it right now and it seems to be working great.

[HAL9000]

Fantastic... I've been curious how long it takes. If you could let me know how much data you transferred and how long it took through the parallel port.