Ghost for backup

[Confused]

Just purchased Norton Ghost. Is this thing as difficult to use as I'm making it from reading the book? Only thing I want to do is make a image of my drive with WIN98 and put it on CD that I can do a system restore with.

Chas
PS
I have Norton Ghost 2002

[skeg]

Hi Confused,

no norton ghost is very easy to use, I ghosted my hard drive to a back up drive wihout any problems

Skeg

[doctorgonzo]

No, Ghost is quite easy to use. Just do a Disk or Partition -> To Image and go from there. It will ask for a filename and compression type, and then it will start. Easy as can be.

[morriswindgate]

Ghost is not as easy to use as drive image, which I condiser to be a superior product to the outdated ghost.

[TwoRails]

Hi Confused,

You can go straight to CD, but what I've been doing lately, is to put the backup right to my HD (you have to go to a differenct partition to do this).

This way, you can drop and drag files to the image. You can also "break" it up into smaller chunks and still burn it to CD if you want.

Ya, reading the book will make you go nuts.... I normally just use the standard menu options.

HTH

TwoRails

[Tuf]

Ghost works well for me.

[Confused]

Thanks for replies. I'm sure I will be back. Had a big problem. Video card went out on my production PC and had to rob my test PC for video card.

Way I do things like this is load on my test PC and after I get comfortable that I know what I'm doing, I will put on production PC. So when my new video card comes in next week I will get back to this.

Way I want to test is to do a backup of test PC to CD. I have a blank HD that I will then install. I then want to restore and bring system back up. That way I know that I will know how to do a backup of my production PC and then restore if I should have a HD failure.
Chas

[reboot]

There's a couple of things to remember.
First, make sure you fdisk and partition the backup drive, and make the partition ACTIVE! If you don't do this, Ghost won't make it active, and it may not boot when mounted as primary master.
You'll probably have to take any other hard drives out of the system when doing this, and mount it as primary master.
Remount it as slave, or on secondary, put the main drive back in, then simply ghost one to the other.
Now you can swap drives and either will boot.
If the main drive crashes, just ghost the backup drive to the main, and it will completely overwrite everything, so you don't even need to reformat or anything.

[Confused]

Thanks Jim, but I don't think I explined myself clearly. I want to take my existing test system and back up to CD's. Then I will treat it like a disk failure. I will take out the (failed) HD and put in another HD and restore with CD's and bring system back up.

If I can do that, then I will move Ghost over to production PC, make a backup and probably every other day thereafter. In the case I have a HD failure, I can buy a new HD and be back up and running on the production PC after I get a new HD.
Chas

[TwoRails]

actually, that is one big reason I like Ghost, as in you don't have to mess with Fdisk or partitions or the like. For one example, I just upgraded a system to add a new 80 gig HD from a smaller one. The step I took were:

Set the new drive to Slave and pluged it in.

Ran Ghost and copied / replicated the original 'C' drive to the new drive, adjusting the sizes of the 8 partitions.

Shutdown (as required) and swap the new drive to the primary 'C' drive, changing the jumpers to Master, of course.

Reboot.

And the system runs fine. No need to do anything but run Ghost. The same is true if you buld a new drive from Ghost images from CD or stored on another HD

TwoRails

[reboot]

The process is even easier if restoring from an image.
Run ghost, make the CD's.
Swap drives.
Run ghost, restore the image.

[Azgir]

The problem I am having is this-- I burnt the image and then wanted to try and bring the image back just to make sure I had done it right. For some reason Ghost will list the CDR as one of my options for a destination but wont list it for a source.

Restarting windows I can see the image file on my CD but Ghost just wont show me.

[Confused]

Not exactly what you are trying to do, but I had a test PC with WIN98 running. After making image of that drive, I disconnected it and put in a blank HD. I booted with the floppy with CDR support that I created in Ghost and it loaded the image to the drive. I then was able to change the boot order back to "C" and bring my operating system back up.
Chas

[TwoRails]

Originally posted by Azgir The problem I am having is this-- I burnt the image and then wanted to try and bring the image back just to make sure I had done it right. For some reason Ghost will list the CDR as one of my options for a destination but wont list it for a source. Restarting windows I can see the image file on my CD but Ghost just wont show me.

What is the directory structure and file name(s) on the CD??

TwoRails