Ghosting

[azscary]

I couldn't seem to locate another area for this question so I hope this is the right forum.

If I understand ghosting, this allows you to transfer OS and all files over to a different hard drive, (i.e. BIGGER hard drive) without having to reinstall your programs and personalized settings. I also understand this to be a software program. My questions are:

1. Is the above true?
2. Does the new drive have to physically be in the same computer or can I set up a simple network and ghost to another box?
3. Where would a person obtain such software?
4. Is it expensive?
5. Are there bad things that can happen when you ghost?

[DrZaius]

Hi azscary,

>> I hope this is the right forum.

Yep, best place to put it.

>> Is the above true?

Yes.

When you ghost a drive you basically make an exact "image" of it so that you can copy it to another drive and it will be exactly the same, and you won't have to reinstall any software or the OS. It's great for making backups or installing the same software on many computers.

>> Does the new drive have to physically be in the same computer or can I set up a simple network and ghost to another box?

Yes.

>> Where would a person obtain such software?
>> Is it expensive?

The best ghosting program is called Norton Ghost. I bought Norton Ghost 2000 Personal Edition (CD only) from here for only $10 (I have yet to use it though.)

>> Are there bad things that can happen when you ghost?

Not that I know of, the process it faily simple and straight forward.

Hope that helps.

[azscary]

Thanks for the rapid info. I see I am not the only one that can't sleep. So just to be sure, If I set up a simple network, ghost my drive to the other box and the new BIGGER drive, I can then replace the old drive with the ghosted drive and everything will work as before but with more hard drive space. Correct?

[DrZaius]

So just to be sure, If I set up a simple network, ghost my drive to the other box and the new BIGGER drive, I can then replace the old drive with the ghosted drive and everything will work as before but with more hard drive space. Correct?

Correct.

[azscary]

Thank you SSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much. I have been putting off getting a bigger and better drive because I didn't want to have to redo two years of customizing and tweaking. I also was looking for an inexpensive and faster way to do backups. I only have a 10GB HD now, but backing up would take a whole BUNCH of 250MB zip disks. By the way, how long does the ghosting process take?

[DrZaius]

Having never done ghosted an entire drive (I usually just format ), I can't really tell you, but other forum members have done it plenty of times and can give you a good answer as to how long it takes.

[azscary]

I will wait patiently (NOT) for their replies.

[Gintaras]

Hi there,
I did backed up not entire HDD, but partition with OS and progies using EZ CD Creators Take 2.
~2.5G of data fit on 3 CDRs, don't remember how long it took to burn CDRs, but to restore OS with progies on other HDD(I tried with same size partition as backup was done from) took about ~1hr. After restoring, PC rebooted in very same condition as on previous HDD.

With take 2 you can backup(ghost) all HDD(or to choose which partitions) you'd like to.

[HAL9000]

BTW, Ghost can be used to transfer to a smaller drive just so long as the data will fit on to it. You don't have to go to a larger drive.

To give you an idea of how long it will take, if your system only supports Ultra33, it will copy at roughly 150 megabytes per minute. If you support Ultra66, the rate is anywhere from 300 to 600 megabytes per minute, so do the math with your data size.

[Carl Price]

Originally posted by HAL9000 BTW, Ghost can be used to transfer to a smaller drive just so long as the data will fit on to it. You don't have to go to a larger drive. To give you an idea of how long it will take, if your system only supports Ultra33, it will copy at roughly 150 megabytes per minute. If you support Ultra66, the rate is anywhere from 300 to 600 megabytes per minute, so do the math with your data size.

Hal, are you saying that you get a sustained transfer rate double that of ATA/33? I thought that transfer rate was burst only! Am I wrong?

[HAL9000]

The lowest I have seen on my BX board was a transfer rate of 100Mb/min, the highest hitting about 220Mb/min. When I installed a Promise Ultra66 card, it varies even more, on the low end of about 300Mb/min to just under 700Mb/min with 7200RPM drives. Why the high end of Ultra 66 is more than triple of Ultra 33, not a clue. I would imagine that it has something to do with the cloning process as it isn't as simple as a direct copy from one drive to another.

[Cricket]

Hi azscary,

I use Ghost and have transferred the OS and programs from one drive (c: partition actually) to another hard drive (c: partition). Works like a charm...great when you're upgrading to a larger or faster hard drive. Saves you a lot of time by not having to install everything again.

One thing, Ghost works from native DOS (not a DOS window). You can have Ghost create a boot disk with mouse support, but it tends to slow things down a little. I just use the keyboard to navigate. To copy 1 GB worth of data from 1 partition to another hard drive with my PII 400MHz doesn't take very long...I think it's less than 15 minutes (I've never timed it). A faster CPU will make the process go by quicker.

I also use Ghost to create a backup of my c: drive once a week (or right before I install anything or mess with the system) that way if the system gets hosed, I don't have to mess around uninstalling the offending application and clearing out leftover system files...I just restore the c: partition with the saved Ghost image and the system is just like new again. Best software investment I ever made.

Cricket

[HAL9000]

Originally posted by Cricket Hi azscary, One thing, Ghost works from native DOS (not a DOS window).

You can use Ghost from within Windows and it will work just fine. It has to be full screen DOS though, it won't work properly in a DOS window.

[azscary]

Originally posted by DrZaius Does the new drive have to physically be in the same computer or can I set up a simple network and ghost to another box?

Yes.


After reading the link you sent on TCP/IP ghosting, it appears MUCH easier to just add the new drive to my computer, partition and format it and then ghost C to D.

[glc]

Folks - most hard drive manufacturers offer a free utility to clone hard drives. I use this all the time - Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM, and Seagate all have one.

Being that we are a Western Digital house, I can describe how easy this is with WD's EZ-Install. You put the new drive in the box as primary master and you put the old drive on any other IDE position available. Boot with the WD disk and choose EZ-Install. Go for the fully automatic setup unless you want to specify custom partition sizes. It will partition and format the drive. The software will then give you the choice to copy your old drive to the new one. Do it - and when it's done you pull the old drive out and boot up to your new hard drive. No need to buy Ghost or fiddle with a network.

[Xayd]

True Glc, but it is a nice backup utility if you have the space to keep the images. I have a backup drive of about 13 gigs, so I can usually backup straight to it with a bit of compression, and then freely tinker with anything on the primary drive without worry of screwing up the data on it .

At any given time, I use regularly about 30 to 40 third-party apps. 10 or so games, 10 or so image/audio/video utilities, and another 10-15 general purpose programs (burning software, mobo monitor, ftp and usenet clients, browsers, etc).

I don't keep the CDs and licenses for these apps organized, it'd take a day just to categorize and store it all. In the time it would take me to re-download and and/or reinstall them all from their CDs, I could take two ghost images of my drive.

[glc]

Sure - but if all you want to do is install a new hard drive the manufacturer's utility does the job very nicely and it's free.

[Carl Price]

Originally posted by HAL9000 You can use Ghost from within Windows and it will work just fine. It has to be full screen DOS though, it won't work properly in a DOS window.

This is correct, but not entirely. The reason for going dos mode is that ghost (or any other program) will not copy open files. If you have any other open windows, those applications will not be copied.

[glc]

This is where the manufacturers' utilities help - they all run self-contained off a bootable disk. They dont care what the OS is, as long as it's FAT of some sort.

[HAL9000]

I disagree completely Carl. I use Ghost on a daily basis and usually do it from Windows as there are certain problems with Ghost combined with a large drive and multiple partitions. Doing it from Windows eliminates the problems. For example, the last time I upgraded my drive from a 10Gb to a 20Gb with 5 partitions, everything seemed normal in Windows. If I booted to DOS, my last partition G:\ was missing. Running FDISK in either DOS or Windows showed both the primary and the extended partition using 100% of the drive. Going into the extended partition, FDISK displayed D, E, and F, but noth the G drive, and showed all three using 100% of the drive as well. Obviously there was something seriously wrong. Going back into Windows and ghosting the drive to a second drive, then shutting down to reverse the drives, boot again and ghosting back again from within windows solved the problem. Out of curiosity, I tried doing it again from DOS and reproduced the problem.

When I wanted to try playing with Windows XP a bit, from within WindowsME, I made an image of my C:\ drive to my G:\ drive. I wiped out C entirely, loaded XP. When I was done, I booted from my WinME CD to a DOS prompt to restore the image. Files were in use when the image was created, but when the image was restored, everything functions normally.

I just find that with large drives and mulitple partitions, there are no problems with doing it in Windows as there appears to be in DOS, so to avoid any other potential problems, I do all of my ghosting from within Windows and have never had a problem with it.

[archie]

Ghost can be used to copy drives and also to make a ghost file for backups. On a slower PC [P166, 64MB RAM], it takes about 10 minutes to ghost from an image file to the boot drive containing approx 300MB of files.
It may be because I'm using an older version of Ghost but yesterday I tried to use it on one PC and it did not work. So before relying on it for backups, test to make sure that the image can be restored if need be.

[ut1205]

About a month ago I restored an image and it got to about the 60% complete point and stopped and gave me some kind of "image corrupt" message. Now I use the function in the Ghost menu to check the image. The one failure is all I've had out of many but I feel a little better after checking the image before depending on it.

[Cricket]

This is why I enjoy visiting this forum so much, I learn something new every single time. Before today, I didn't know that Ghost could be run from a full DOS window in Windows...now I do. Thanks for enlightening us HAL9000 .

Cricket

[Jenni]

Make sure you run a virus scan on your drives before attempting to Ghost. Viruses do nasty things to Ghost. If you make a bootable floppy, run the virus scan on the floppy too! A defrag before Ghosting would probably speed things up too.