Norton Ghost

[ssahl]

Just wanted to know everyones thoughts on the reliabilaty on a ghosted drive. I had ghosted my winxp drive to a new bigger drive because I was running out of room, and I kind of wanted one with a 8mb cache. well everything went just fine, booted up first time and I thought, awsome this is great. Well, not so awsome, seems to me that problems here and there are starting to appear that shouldnt be. Freezing up, Locking up, currupt files, things like that, and they were never there before. I know that I could put my old drive back in and it would run flawless, even though it only has less then a gig of room left on it. My point is that for one, it is not an EXACT copy. some things somewhere are missing or different, I dont know enough about windows to say just what, but I'll give you an example, all shareware that was on my computer went back to how it was when I first installed it, 30 days left on your trial. At first I thought man this really cool, but know I'm thinking of doing what I thought I got away without doing, starting over and reinstalling my OS (os's) on the new bigger/better hard drive. the way it's running right now it's like when I had win98, I will not go back to that ever, crashing, freezing, locking up for no reason, screw that.

[ssahl]

Has anyone else who uses Norton Ghost had this or other problems like it? You cant tell me that nobody here has every used the program. If that were true through, that would answer my question.

[casey]

I have done in excess of 300 Ghosted drives/Images with:
Ghost 6
Ghost 6.5
Ghost 7
Ghost 2003
and have not had 1 failure yet, BUT ALLWAYS VERIFY THE IMAGE AFTER IT HAS BEEN MADE and all these Images/Clones had been done directly in DOS.

[casey]

Faulty new hard drive maybe ?

[andyms18a]

gost works best with 2 identical drives i have had problams gosting to bigger drives i wood keep the old drive as master and the new drive as slave and move the my doc and page file to the new drive to free up space on the old and install new programs on the new drive

[ssahl]

Yea I did it in DOS, when I say winXP though thats not the whole story. In order to get xp to work I needed to ghost my win98, it was/is a dual boot setup, actually it's a multi-boot setup. Win98 on the C drive, XP on the D drive, and Lynux on the unused space. I ghosted the C drive to the new drive and then ghosted the D drive, the new drive had already been partitioned into 3 sections and formated the same as the old drive but no drive letters were assigned to them. I left Lynux alone, now when I turn the computer on it boots up like it did before I installed lynux on it, just asking me if I want to boot to 98 or xp. and yes they were both verified, however, 98 took on the first try, but xp didnt work the first try, it did on the second though. All has been quite lately, so we'll see what happens and if she starts acting up again. old drive was 40gb ibm and new drive is 80gb maxtor, both 7200 rpm though, and all fat32. I would of just did the whole dirve, but I wanted the D partition (winXP) to have more room, the reason for getting the drive, thats why I did it that way.

[David_Jones]

If you don't mind backing up (in time), I would suggest the following:

Ghost your old disk in its entirety (not just the partitions), and drop it onto the new disk (don't worry about the wasted space for now).

That should replicate everything, and work as before, assuming that the disks are not so different that there are hardware compatibility issues.

If that works, then expand or add new partitions to use the remaining space as you like.

There are planty of ways to expand the "D" partition later if you want to do that.

As mentioned above, ALWAYS verify the image before using it, and ALWAYS use ghost from a pure DOS environment (boot disk or CD for example).

Does that help at all?

David.

[morriswindgate]

Problems like this is why I quit using Ghost and now use only Drive Image by Powerquest.

[David_Jones]

I have to defend Ghost.

I have used it without a single issue in years. I accept that I probably haven't used it on as many different setups as Morris, but it is absolutely rock solid as far as I am concerned.

I don't think I could say that about any other piece of software whatsoever, since everything else runs under Windows and is as inherently stable / unstable as that platform itself.

David "Ghost Fan" Jones.