Norton Ghost

[babylon5guy]

Hi,
I may have an unbootable hard drive and will have to reformat and reinstall windows 98 http://www.pcmech.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=80991 I was thinking of temporarily installing another hard drive to the system and copy all the files to it then doing a clean install of windows 98 (hope I can talk them into XP) to the original hard drive Then copy the needed files back to the clean install of windows 98. Will ghost copy in dos? If not what would be a good way to copy the files off this hard drive to another?
TIA

[reboot]

If you only need the data off the drive, mount it as slave in an already running system.

[babylon5guy]

Thanks reboot, but the drive is just temporary, I'm going to use one of mine just to hold the data. If I did it the way you say I would have to install windows on my drive get the files off the other one then erase their drive and copy my drive to theirs. Which works but seems to me a couple of time consuming extra steps. However if that's the best way I guess I'll bite the bullet. Do you know if the backup.pst file is the one that will restore their mail settings in outlook in the new install?
TIA

[babylon5guy]

^^^^^^

[reboot]

Ghost will make an exact replica of the disk. It's not a matter of "will ghost work in DOS", it MUST work in DOS. The ghost boot diskette has it's own version of DOS, and will clone the drive byte by byte, not at Windows file by file level.

[babylon5guy]

Thanks reboot. I never used ghost before. Last time I did something like this I used xcopy32 instructions in the Hall of Fame section of this board, which worked good by the way. But this PC I'm working on they have a copy of Ghost and I thought it would be easier as xcopy took a long time. I'm going to just install Win 98 on my hard drive, get thier files off their hard drive clean theirs off and ghost mine back to theirs.

[glc]

Ghosting a corrupted hard drive will.......give you a corrupted image.

Slave the bad drive into a working computer and copy the files off it with xcopy32 or windows explorer.

[babylon5guy]

Thanks glc, good point. I'll do that.