Ghost Disc Installable Image?

[Cuc Tu]

I finally just about got my laptop installed, just one small bug to resolve, then I'd like to make a disc image.

I'm wondering if I can make an image using Ghost 2003 on a DVD that will contain all the required software to restore the image if needed?

When I make an image of the 80GB laptop drive using fast compression, the resulting file (.gho) is only about a GB. It just has Windows XP Pro, SP3 and all updates and drivers installed.

[Paul Komski]

Radified (http://ghost.radified.com/norton_ghost_2003.htm) should have most, if not all, the answers you need. G-2003 can certainly read/write DVDs but I doubt if you can make a dedicated recovery DVD as you can usually do with BiNG, for example. It's possible you might be able to make the Ghost "Floppy" onto a DVD but you would have to test if it would be functional first. After that, having made the image somewhere else you could remake the DVD "Floppy" using floppy emulation but also copy your Ghost image to the DVD as a data file and as part of the burning process.

[Cuc Tu]

It talks about making a boot floppy. I don't have a floppy drive and was concerned that if I boot using the Ghost CD, then I would not be able to remove this disc to restore from my Image CD.

Maybe Ghost boots and loads completely in memory and it would work...

[boucbaz]

If your HD is a SATA , your ghost will never see the HD since it needs driver before writing to it. Even Acronis has a cerain limit on those. Good luck.

[Paul Komski]

If your HD is a SATA , your ghost will never see the HD since it needs driver before writing to it. Even Acronis has a cerain limit on those.
As far as SATA goes it can depend on how the BIOS setup is configured: AHCI, IDE/PATA, SATA, SCSI/SAS.
After that it then depends on whether the OS in question polls the hardware for itself and on how the BIOS and the OS talk to each other.

An example might help explain an often poorly understood area:


DOS and the DOS-based versions of Windows (and hence Ghost 2003 as per the OP) see USB and SATA drives as well as any RAID arrays on my ASUS A8NE board without the need for any specialist drivers. They succeed in doing this OK but the file system on the partitions they want to read must be FAT (or the software must have NTFS drivers - as Ghost 2003 has) to be capable of seeing any data on them. They succeed in doing this because DOS doesn't poll the hardware and simply believes what the BIOS tells it. {Booting to USB hard/solid-state drives on the same hardware (that can see the drives and the data) is a different matter and a different discussion which will only cloud the issue here}.
What Acronis "sees" on the same hardware depends (just as with Ghost) on which part of the Acronis suite is being used (TrueImage/DiskDirector/etc) and, in particular, which version. The earliest versions were DOS based but later came to be Linux based. The earlier versions of the Linux based Acronis did need "drivers" because the kernels used did not support AHCI/RAID natively. Thus I discovered, to my annoyance, that Acronis could break my twin SATA drive RAID-1 on the same hardware as above just because it did poll the hardware for itself and then would "see" two separate SATA drives. This is completely analagous to Win2K/XP etc starting up without the drivers having been included in the setup (usually by using the F6 option) when prompted. Attempts to install WinXP (without the SATA/RAID drivers having been included and on the same hardware as above) would also break the array. (Note 1 that this includes any NT/WinXP based Live CDs such as a BartPE CD. Note 2 that on other hardware, the hardware-polling OSes like NT and Linux might see no drives at all without drivers or kernel support).
These problems with what gets "seen" so differently on different hardware is why I have persisted with the DOS-based BiNG for all my partitioning and imaging needs.

With optical media it is possible to split/partition them into different areas. One method is to use floppy emulation to create a bootable CD/DVD. When such a disk is booted-to it can emulate whatever boot floppy image was used in its construction. Thus a DOS boot floppy (with CDROM support included) can boot to an A: prompt and then see whatever else has been placed on the CD/DVD portion of the very same CD/DVD. I haven't tried this with Ghost 2003 but it is a feasible if somewhat messy way to go. An image file of the Ghost floppy and a recovery image file of the partition(s) for restoration would be needed on the hard drive. An ISO could then be created using the zmakeiso file in the quick start section of http://paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1814 and then burned to disk. Nero BurningROM should also be capable of doing this. One potential limitation of this technique is that if the software needs to write to the floppy it wont be capable of doing this to a floppy emulated portion of a CD/DVD and so would fail.

BiNG will create a bootable CD/DVD containing a copy of its own software as part and parcel of creating an image file onto a DVD. The only problems I have had with this bootable disk is when it has been necessary to span more than one DVD to hold the recovery image file. The free trial would let you easily see if this was a viable way to go.