Nortons Ghost

[tony draper]

A mate has given me Nortons Ghost,as I understand it, this can be used to copy the contents of one hard disk across to another.
It also states on the cover it is a recovery utillity.
I'm a bit leary about these since I loaded some recovery software that came on a new motherboard driver disc,the bloody thing would.t let me alter anything in bios or use regedit, if i did so it immediatly changed it back.
This was just a new built machine and I was still pottering about with bios settins, and this was a right pain in the arse, had to reformat my disc and reload everything from scratch to get rid of the bugga, it required a password to delete it which I did not have.
Does nortons Ghost do anything like this ?.

[HandyAndy]

Tony

Have a gander at this link:

Ghost - How to (http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_1.htm)

It is a good back up should your system go t*ts up. Basically it creates an "image" of your whole disk or a partition (your decision) and places it where you wish - either on another partition or on cd-rom. For example, you can iamge your c drive andd put that image on your d drive. In an emergency, you can boot the system to dos with a boot disk created with Ghost and reinstate the partition or disk that became inoperable with the c drive image you stored on d.

Most handy for images of your c drive as this is the one most likely to fail, but you can use it on any partition or drive. You will of course lose any data from the time you created the image to the time of the failure.

I do this at least once a week (more if time permits) fo peace of mind and it *does* work.

Best!
HA

[Mac the Knife]

Simpler than Ghost and makes a true clone rather than an image is XXCOPY. It also costs nothing for personal use. Doesn't do strange things to your drive(s), leaves the MBR alone, doesn't ferk up your Windows installation, just works.

It's a true 32-bit program that runs in a DOS window under Windows.

XXCOPY Personal Edition v2.80.3 is free from Pixielabs at http://www.xxcopy.com/

Its like a superpowerful Xcopy and the equivalent of a very sharp knife - wonderful if you are careful. The command syntax is very complex and rather arcane, but can do amazing tricks in file management.

Often used for moving drives, but like HandyAndy I use it to clone my main drive to a similar sized backup drive that lives in the woodshed.

For copying drives (clone the C:\ drive to D:\ drive)

XXCOPY C:/ D:/ \CLONE will do the trick.
Just remember to start in the root (i.e. C:\) when you do this.
Add /PB if you want to see a pretty Windows progress bar as well.


Just make sure that you are in a DOS box in Windows (you heard me right, IN Windows). And if you're like me, with a lot of physical. logical and mapped drives, make sure you've typed the right f**king drive letter for the destination (only made that mistake once).

RTFM (Read The Firkin Manual) which is long and complicated, but worth it. It'll handle NTFS volumes too.