my ghosting setup?

im thinking of breaking my big 160 gig drive into two separate partitions: 60 gigs or so for windows, program files, etc.("the windows partition") and 100 gigs for storing my big files("the storage partition"). i would leave the storage partition alone aside from storing stuff in it, but i'm hoping to be able to make an image of the windows partition and be able to restore it as needed. i plan on using ghost 9.0 for this but i have a few questions:

1. i have to install ghost in order to make the drive image but i dont want the ghost installation to be on the image, i only want the basic install of windows xp and the updates, drivers, etc. for the system. am i going to have to install windows and ghost on some secondary drive or computer and then make the good image of my windows partition from there, or is there an easier way? i didnt see an ability to make a drive image when booted off of the ghost cd, only restoration and some other diagnostic stuff.

2. if i restore the windows partition sometime, will it affect the storage partition? possibly re-partition the entire drive into one big partition with the windows image on it or something?

3. i'd like to be able to burn the image to a bootable cd and just throw that cd in and let it extract the image onto my drive without booting from the ghost install cd, etc. you used to be able to do it like this: http://users.pandora.be/soulmaniacs/ghost.html with old versions of ghost, but i havent seen a way to do it with the newer versions(i'm using 9.0) i was hoping they would have built this in or something by now.

4. what filesystem would you recommend for the storage partition so that i can read and write to it from different operating systems?(windows and linux)

I know our desktop support guys use a Windows PE disc with ghost installed. I don't know a lot about PE, but I use several Live Linux CDs and thats a pretty good route to go.

As for the storage partition, if you want to read and write 'easily' from Linux and Windows, FAT32 is probably your best bet. NTFS support is getting better in Linux all the time, but it's still spotty at times. If it wasn't important data, this might be worth the risk, but since this is your big 'data partition' you should probably use FAT32.

fat32 it is :D

what about making the image without the ghost installation on it? i know if i was an admin or something, i wouldnt want my user's machines to have that on there. is there a way to make an image without installing ghost or maybe a way to tell ghost to exclude certain things?

Well I haven't used it myself. Like I said, the desktop guys use WinPE. If you don't know what that means, Windows PE is basically a Live Windows version...you can make a windows desktop CD with certain software installed on it (for example, Norton Ghost). You boot the computer from WinPE (instead of the harddrive) and make an image of the harddrive.

If you know any linux, you don't really need WinPE to do this (or Ghost for that matter). You could boot to a Live Linux distro like Knoppix, Helix, etc. and simply do a dd of the harddrive.

i actually do use knoppix distros quite a bit, but i didnt realize that linux had that kind of functionality built in. if it does, why are there people out there making things like partimage and ghost 4 linux ?

oh, looks like g4u and g4l are just shell scripts that use dd to do drive imaging. partimage looks a little more advanced than dd tho, but the page says it wont work with ntfs yet.

what if i took that configuration, the main hard drive with the windows and storage partitions and added another drive to dual boot with linux(i've done this before). would i be able to make an image of the mbr and restore it if i need to? im guessing ghost or dd would only grab the mbr if i did an image of the entire drive, not just a partition and i dont think i'll be wanting to make an image that huge since the master drive would be 160gb.

mbr is on the first sector of the disk so you'd just use count=1 to grab it i guess

my jump drive uses a plain FAT filesystem, i'm guessing its because regular fat is compatible with more system types, but if fat32 is faster, more stable, etc. and it will work with windows and linux, i'll just use fat32.