Does Ghost ALWAYS take this long? edit: Dang! Thought I put this in Software

[TimPoet]

Well, I Ghosted my HD today and while I only have about 7 gigs used, it tooks a couple hours to ghost my partitions (2 of them) to CD-R's. It took 5 disks.
Is that normal?
Is there a faster way. I'm going to FDISK and reformat my HD, cuz I want to add a partition in a way that is least likely to lose all my setup.


edit: Can a mod pls move this into the Software forum. Thanks.

[morriswindgate]

Yeah Ghost is kinda slow sometimes, that is the reason I use Drive Image. When you get it partitioned, install and create and image to a partition using DI. You can also set DI to save it in files sized for writing to CD-Rs.

[highrisemech]

Before you go and reformat. You should make sure these disks will in fact restore your image. I did this recently with Ghost 2002 then when it came time to do the restore I could not get the disks to work the program just stops and thier tech support was not much help either. IMHO I think ghost works best when copying directly to another harddrive.

[casey]

The best is to to ghost it to another drive. 7 gig should take about 30 minutes (depending on your system specs) Then you can split the image in Windows and burn it to CDR or CDRW. Then you should boot with a ghost boot disk and do a "Check image" this check will run through all the CDR's (CRC32 check) and verify the image. I do this a couple of times a week and it has never failed me. What HAS FAILED is when you ghost directly to a CDR. Some Cd Writers don't like this. For some reason there are more failures with CDR than CDRW discs. The classic example is "cannot open error log" I have done 100's of split images in windows and then burning to CDR and have never had a faliure.

[lpc300]

I have had the same experience as highrisemech and casey. Ghosted my HDD to CD-R's and got the error log message. No problem Ghosting to another HDD, though.

Casey, what do you mean by splitting the image in Windows?

[TimPoet]

Well, that's not my problem now. But it is giving me another one.
See my thread I just started.
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38714

[casey]

IPC300
1. You must have Ghost installed in Windows
2. Double click and open the image (Windows)
3. In Ghost choose "View Options"
4. Set your span split point and tick auto name. (say 700 mb for CDR)
5. File choose "Compile"
6. Name and save Image
7. Ghost will now split your Image (say the image was 2.1 gig) ghost will split it in 3 so that you can burn it to 3 CDR or CDRW's
8. Works like a charm, I do it almost daily.