Is Norton Ghost the best thing if I want to be able to reformat and restore my C:\ partition to the way it was before some catastrophe? I don't want to have to go through pain of reinstalling windows and all my applications if I can just pop in some dvds and restore all of this if I just maintain current backups.

Basically, can I do this restore without having to reinstall programs and application settings (Firefox etc)? Will all applications I install after the restore have to be reinstalled because the registry does not have the changes? Will Ghost give me any problems with any games that look for drive emulation as copy protection?

I have tried the MS backup utility but it sucks and if it doesn't fit on one DVD, it won't back it up. My version of Roxio doesn't have a backup option. I have Nero which will backup, but I'm not sure exactly if that's what I need for what I want to do.

7/26/2005 11:33:32 AM

Quote :

"if I can just pop in some dvds and restore all of this if I just maintain current backups."

I thought when you "ghost" you copy everything (i.e paritions, data, etc) to a complete other hard drive.

7/26/2005 11:36:17 AM

Heres how it works.

Format and reinstall windows.

install all the software you normally use and drivers and whatever else.

Make sure its working as a fresh build should.

Then ghost the drive.


When you fuck up again, instead of installing windows and all your shit, just re-image the drive with ghost. It saves a shitload of time.

Quote :

"thought when you "ghost" you copy everything (i.e paritions, data, etc) to a complete other hard drive. "

you can select what partitions to copy. It makes an image file which you can burn to cd/dvd or store on another computer.

[Edited on July 26, 2005 at 11:38 AM. Reason : .]

7/26/2005 11:37:24 AM

norton ghost will restore the entire hard drive (or the selected partition) to the exact same state as when you took the image, including your registry, applications, settings, drivers, activations, etc. So yes, it is very very nice to restore a computer back to a known state. I used it all the time last summer for software testing - an empty Windows XP installation creates about a 1.2GB ghost image IIRC, and it only takes about 3-4 mintues to completely restore an image (depending on size of partition, speed, etc etc).

I don't know how much it's used for disaster recovery, but I suppose could work. The problem there is, if you have a disaster and your HDD dies, or your motherboard or CPU or something dies, then you may have a hard time restoring the ghost image on a computer with any replaced components. That is, if you make any hardware changes between the time the image was taken, and when you have to restore it (either an upgrade or a replacement due to failure), then the image might get confused because the computer is not in the same state as when you took the image. Especially if your harddrive dies, you'll need to replace it with the exact same brand, model and size, if possible, for the image to work. I'm sure there's ways around this, but that would make it easiest.

7/26/2005 11:42:23 AM

Quote :

"and it only takes about 3-4 mintues to completely restore an image (depending on size of partition, speed, etc etc). "

over a network i assume...

7/26/2005 11:44:34 AM

if you try to restore it on another set of hardware its hit and miss wether it will work.

To combat this, you can sysprep the windows installation before making the image.

this adds a few minutes to the reimage process, but it allows you to reimage pretty much any set of hardware with the image.

7/26/2005 11:46:01 AM

^^ no, from another partition on the same drive.

I guess that time wouldn't apply in this case, using a DVD or network.

For my software testing, I had 1 normal windows partition that I used for work and where I stored the images, then 1 partition for Windows XP images and 1 for Windows 2000 images (note: you can only have 4 partitions on a drive, and Ghost needs to create a virtual partition or something to restore and create an image, so you can only have 3 "normal" partitions on a drive you want to use Ghost on).


^ yeah, i looked into sysprep, but never used it. Thats how system administrators can create one ghost image, then install it on dozens of machines, each of which may have slightly different configurations.


[Edited on July 26, 2005 at 11:49 AM. Reason : ,]

7/26/2005 11:47:39 AM

we store all our ghost images on a server on the network. We also have a PXE server on the same box that hosts a floppy image that provides dos networking and drive mapping. So once the drive is mapped you simply go to the drive with all the images and use ghost.exe.

works really well.

7/26/2005 11:51:22 AM

I would make a new image right after installing new hardware so that wouldn't be much of an issue. If my HD fails then I'll get another one from Seagate which will be the same until they don't support my drive anymore which will be a while I think. I'm more interested, however, in if I'm restoring just the image for the C:\ will it only redo my C:\ partition. I wouldn't want it to erase my other paritions (D-G).

Then after I have restored that image I would have to reinstall any programs and redo application settings that I had put in after I had made the ghost because they wouldn't be in the registry?

Can Nero do the same thing basically? I don't want to buy Ghost if I don't have to.

[Edited on July 26, 2005 at 11:57 AM. Reason : wrong word]

7/26/2005 11:54:17 AM

you have full control over what drive letters (i.e. partitions) are ghosted, so you can just select C:, and it will leave all your other partitions/drives alone.

Anything you do to your system after you create the initial image will be fully lost when you restore the image to the partition

[Edited on July 26, 2005 at 11:57 AM. Reason : .]

7/26/2005 11:56:49 AM

Quote :

"Then after I have restored that image I would have to reinstall any programs and redo application settings that I had put in after I had made the ghost because they wouldn't be in the registry?"

for some.

some dont put stuff in your registry so you'd be ok just recreating shortcuts. But you would have to reinstall anything not on your C:\ drive when you made the image.

Of course you can also make ghost run every week much like norton AV and push any updates into your image. This is a bad idea if you're spyware prone.


As for HDDs, it really doesn't matter the make or model since the reimage will work fine as long as the drive or partition is equal to or greater to the ammount of data stored in the image.

So if you had an 10GB drive and your windows install was only 2GB, the image would be ~2GB and could be restored on any drive equal to or bigger than 2GB.

[Edited on July 26, 2005 at 11:59 AM. Reason : .]

7/26/2005 11:59:04 AM

Quote :

"Can Nero do the same thing basically? I don't want to buy Ghost if I don't have to."

Norton software is typically bloated and difficult to uninstall (I used to have Norton Firewall). Is there any other software that can do this?

7/26/2005 12:39:56 PM

[Edited on July 26, 2005 at 12:42 PM. Reason : damn double post flood control]

7/26/2005 12:41:40 PM

Symantec's corporate products are infinately less bloated than their home user stuff.

Ghost is a fine example. All you really need is the 1MB ghost.exe

7/26/2005 1:21:36 PM

cool thanks shaggy and agentlion

7/26/2005 1:29:14 PM

another option available is Norton's GoBack, which is similar to MS's system restore functionality, only it[goback] operates on the HD level instead of the registry level. Basically, GoBack tracks changes that occur to your HD and makes a log of them every so often. Thus, in much the same way that you can use System Restore to go back to a previous registry state, you could use GoBack to go back to a previous HD state. The trade-off, however, is that the GoBack software uses a portion of your HD to store its log. In addition, there are no DVDs to which you would store the data, so if the HD crashed, then you are SOL. Plus, there is the problem that GoBack only keeps track of the history of changes, so after a while, the history gets overwritten. Thus, GoBack would not be ideal to use for going back to your system's initial state after a reformat, as that info could eventually be overwritten.

I haven't used GoBack that much to know how much history it holds, or to really be able to say if it is worth it or not. I just know about the program itself in general. I'd say that a GoBack/Ghost combo would probably be 100% guaranteed to give you what you want, though if it is necesary, I can't truly say. Probably, getting a 2nd hard drive on which to store Ghost images every couple of weeks and then also installing GoBack would work as well, and provide the "DVD" version of what you want...

7/26/2005 6:31:34 PM

crikey - http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/47697
Ghost 9.0 for $4

7/31/2005 6:32:34 PM

i suppose it wouldn't be very difficult to write a crappy ghost program by yourself

7/31/2005 6:51:38 PM

it probably wouldn't be too hard to write the packaging and compressing part of the program, but Ghost also includes a primative operating system that the computer boots to when creating or restoring an image. And there's lots of features to get that small OS working with device drivers so it can make images on an optical drive or a network drive, USB, etc. So that wouldn't be easy

7/31/2005 6:55:48 PM

yeah but you could use dr dos for that

[Edited on July 31, 2005 at 6:59 PM. Reason : .]

7/31/2005 6:59:03 PM

^^^^ $.99 for me. or is the $4 w/ shipping?

7/31/2005 7:32:36 PM

google g4u (ghost for unix) it's a ghost knock off, it works ok but isn't as good as ghost. ghost 9 sucks ass and doesn't have a boot floppy creation tool. the version I had didn't atleast

7/31/2005 9:25:03 PM