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Hi
Going to upgrade to a new HD soon; just would like to know anyones reviews on a program called norton ghost. You have to back up the image to a dvd , yes/no?
Also how does it work etc.
Running Xp sp2, so installing windows once again will be a hassle with updates etc as I dont have a 8mbit connection like you folks abroad.
Any hints and tips appreciated.
Thanks
With ghost it will depend on where you plan to back up a snapshot of your hard drive. You can burn the .gho and .gst(I think It's been a few years since I worked with ghost) onto a DVD. When I worked with ghost we would either utilize a ghost server or create a network share and pull the images to there.
As for the updates, I would pre-download them and store them somewhere you can access during installation. Since you mentioned you wanted to work on your MCSE (I believe it was you, I could be wrong) it would be an excellent time to practice using the automated installation switches covered in the 70-270 exame.
Hi
Thanks for the reply.
Yes it was me whom was interested in doing MCSE. I am going to have to study pretty hard as I dont know that much. Want to do the MCSE because I can learn alot.
You mentioned the automated installation; could you elaborate abit on this.
Thanks again.
Ghost is pretty much the standard app for imaging and a
good tool to add to one's repertoire. I've done a lot of rollouts,
and it was always Ghost that was used for imaging.
There's numerous versions, from 6 and 7 and 7.5, to 8, to
9 and 10 (the latest?). They are very different animals.
A lot changed with 9. That version incorporated Symantec's
acquisition of Drive Image and 10 evolved from there. I'm
not familiar with these later versions, but I understand they
are very different.
7.5 and earlier were basically designed to boot from a floppy,
and ran strictly under DOS. And most anything over 2 GB's
had to use spanned images, something of an added pain. I
think it was version 6 that got me started on Ghost.
With 8, ghost32.exe was included and made it much easier to
run on a PE disk (bootable cd). I use 8 on a Bart PE cd, and
like it very much. Booting from floppies is very arcane anymore.
And with Bart's, it's easy to ghost images to usd-connected
hdd's (harddrives).
Any version going to have a slew of network features, some
requiring batch programming and so forth. It's very versatile.
This is a good guide to Ghost:
http://ghost.radified.com/
Hi Cider,Quote:
Originally Posted by Cider
The downside of not re-installing is that your image will contain some of the results of installing updates over updates over updates. It's always a good thing to re-install Windows every so often. Just looking at the "Add/Remove Programs" screen will show you how much stuff has been going on since you last installed it.
How recent is your installation? Was it immediately SP2, or did you install SP2 over SP1 + patches?
While I understand the beauty of just taking an image, I would also consider the cleaning up of your install.
Cheers,
BrainStop
Sigh, installed about 2 years ago. If you have seen my other posts, I have had a problem with partition size. I made my windows parttion abit too small but nihil and others helped me free up some space so that is fine now.
Okay: I know 2 years is definately a new windows install.
Q1. Where do i find the updates I have downloaded and installed so I dont have to redownload them etc. I have major bandwidth problems in South africa and to re-download all of them will take me, no jokes 2 days non stop.
Thanks for the replies.
We use Ghost version 9 at work. It is pretty simple. You install the application on the system, select your compression option, and back up the image to the local drive, CD / DVD, or a network share. This version has a very simple GUI.
To restore the image, just boot from the disk.
I have noticed that version 9 doesn't support certain NICs.
I personally hate Ghost. I have had it screw up systems when it boots to its own little dos thing to start the backup that i then have to try to get rid of. Not fun. I started using Acronis True Image and man does that thing rock. Every system i have used it on its had no problem with different nics Sata, even Raid arrays. There enterprise version is very sweet. You can setup a backup server push out the client to all the server and it will back it up without having to take it off line, you can do a restore directly from the backup server. compleatly centrally managed server imaging. It can even do SQL and Exchange databases without taking the database offline and dosn't corrupt the DB. If you want a killer imaging app go with acronis!!