Ghosting Q

[phantombadger]

I have a Question About Ghosting. I have read that the popular use is to backup your HD. I Have built and entirety new computer and entirely I mean every piece of HW is completely different. I have a Storage Disc which I want to copy over to my new Storage disc then Wipe the old one for even more storage. I am looking to move around 120gb from a 200gb to a 320gb drive. I know that you have to ghost after you format the drive, and thats about all. I need to know what to do after that and how to do it and if i really have to ghost in DOS w/ a bootdisk or if i can doit in windows cuz its not my OS disc. And also is ghosting called ghosting only cuz of Symantec like tissue being called kleenex.

[Paul Komski]

Just to be clear; ghosting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosting), to most people, means cloning one partition to another or one disk to another. That can be done directly by copying the HDD sectors or indirectly by copying them to an image file (stored on many different types of media) from which the image can be replicated/restored later-on. I think Norton used the term Ghost because of what their software did and not vice versa - so not a kleenex or hoover issue.

Files can also be copied across and if you have a non-system pure storage or data disk this is easily done from within windows using windows explorer. With WinXP in particular (because files in use can be locked by certain apps) utilities such as ImageForWindows (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/imagew.html) and Acronis can "hot image" onto another partition and though such image files are useful backups that usually work when restored they are not as good as literal cloned images such as created by BiNG (in my sig) or ImageForDOS (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/image.html) or Ghost or DDforWindows (http://www.chrysocome.net/dd).

Images/ImageFiles must be copied to formatted partitions but partitions can also be copied directly into unallocated space or to completely unpartitioned HDDs by utilities such as BiNG or DD or Partition Magic. Most disk manufacturers also provide utilities for cloning an old drive onto their own new one.

Doing these things from outside windows is always preferable IMHO and BiNG for example can run from Floppy, CD or even if installed onto the MBR in conjunction with a small FAT partition directly from a boot menu that comes up at startup.

PartSave and DriveImageXML are yet other possibilities (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=50791). For simplicity I highly recommend ImageForDOS run from floppy or CD. All the terabyteunlimited image files can have individual files/folders restrored from the images using their freeware TBIview (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html) utility.

[phantombadger]

Most disk manufacturers also provide utilities for cloning an old drive onto their own new one.

How would I get to these? I havent used DOS in over a deacade.or is it through BIOS?

[Paul Komski]

Go the website (which manufacturer made your drive) and download the floppy or CD image file for their diagnostic/etc utility - to make your own bootable floppy or CD. It will run on DOS but you wont have to deal with any command prompts - just follow the options given to you. Same would be true for ImageForDOS, etc.

[phantombadger]

thx much like