Norton Ghost

[wiginer]

Hi, Ive been playing with ghost and am a bit stuck. It wont let me do what I want it to do.

What I want is this :- I bought a PC from a store a good few years ago (which I no longer have). It had a copy of XP pre-installed and came with one of them restore disc.
On the HDD there was an hidden partition with a ghost image accessed when booted from restore disc.

Now, when I try to do this with ghost it keeps on telling me its unable to, cant remember the exact message, something about system files on the same disc.

Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Also the restore disc that was supplied, was a CD-R. How is it possible to fit a whole OS onto one of these disc?

Thanks in advance...

[bailey]

welcome to pcmech.

its simple, you can.t.

that hidden partition is for the recovery cd only and is set up for that one system only,
you cannot copy it to another system and have it work.

you need special software to creat that partition and install the software on it, and you also must have the recover cd for it, and then it will only work on that one system.

this is as I understand it, but also I could be wrong too.

[wiginer]

Hi Bailey,

Thanks for the welcome and reply

I dont suppose you know what software is needed, and if its commercially available?.

I can remember when I used to do a reload with the restore disc, it was a Ghost image, version 5 I think (could be wrong about ver. #). Thats why I thought you could do it with Ghost. Using version 2003 BTW.

I've been using Drive Image in the past, and putting image on second HDD, but dont really like it. Had a couple of mis-haps and dont really want to anymore.

The thought of creating my own restore disc appeals and I would really like to be able to do this.

I know you can create backup image onto disc media, but I dont have a DVD burner, and to put it onto CD-r takes many disc's

[bailey]

what make is the pc and what is the O/S ?

[wiginer]

I think you may have misread my original post, I no longer have the PC with the restore disc, I sold that a while ago.

What I have now is one I built myself, and wanted to make my own restore disc which I could put a few software programs onto, have OS up to date with the newest fixes and patches and could just boot from it to give me a clean install.

Obviously I'd have to discard the disc periodically after a fresh install and make a new one with the newest fixes, but that wouldnt be a problem if only I could find out how is done.

OS i'm using is XP Home BTW.

Thanks again for your input.

[Confused]

I have read several threads on this forum about making a image for restore using Ghost. Do a search on Ghost. Should give you enough reading until someone comes along that dose it and and can give detailed instructions.
Chas

[bailey]

in that case all you want to do is make a system back-up of the entire hard drive so you can format it sometime in the future and just use the back-up cd's you made to replace everything you had on the hard drive.
if thats all your wanting to do, there should be no problem.
ghost will do that just fine.

it may take more than one or two cd's though.

[Doobie]

What I do is just make a clean install and install all my software that I usually install everytime.

Then make a bootdisk and then edit the autoexec.bat so it will execute ghost with some command lines switches. Then make a bootable cd from the disket and add ghost.exe and the image to the cd.

When I want to restore the image I just put the cd in the cmputer and it does it automatcially and reboots when finished. I just have to remember to take out the cd becuase if i dont it will just repeat the process.

[glc]

I have never used Ghost, but I use Drive Image 5. It can burn an image directly to CD's, splitting it across multiple CD's, running it from boot floppies. I would assume Ghost would have a similar capability. I don't mess with trying to create a bootable CD with the program on it, it's easy enough to run the program off boot floppies to restore the image, just start feeding it the CD's starting with the first one.

Drive Image also allows you to split images if you are imaging to a partition - so you can just burn each segment on separate CD's as a set after you finish creating the image.