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Ghost replacement

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by dumphrey

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For years I have used Norton Ghost 2003 to manage my disk image needs. I would boot off the cd, make my image, and reboot back to XP/Linux. These days, I find ghost more often then not failing. I feel the problem is sata driver related, but see no easy solution. I have tried other products, such as g4u, and clonezilla. Both work, but have their own drawbacks, and are very slow.
What programs do you all use to image drives, and why do you use them?

13 replies

by cmiller5400

I have used that for several years with SATA drives and have had no issues. (IBM S51, M52, M55)

by dumphrey

bean counters... Any weird issues with it failing to work with usb either? I have no idea what happened but lately, everything I try to ghost fails.

by cmiller5400

I use GhostCast Server on a W2k3 box to receive the image.

by robo_dev

The tricky part these PCs with all the different partitions(Dell).

by dumphrey

Ghost 2003 would not image a Dellrecovery partition, saying partition offset was incorrect. Deleting the recover partition, and using partimage to grow the primary partiton usually works (after a chkdsk and chkntfs). The problem I have been having lately is laptops... getting a product to image a failing laptop drive to a use disk...

by nimmo

Take a look/download a trial of Acronis.

http://www.acronis.com/

Using Acronis you can create what is called a secure zone (along with normal images).

A secure zone takes a portion of available drive space and creates a compressed image of you local drive that is stored on the local hard drive itself.

When you want to re-build the machine all you have to do is to hit F11 and it'll boot into the Acronis secure zone then you simply navigate through the menu to the restore feature and restore it.

by dumphrey

done with ghost. Except with ghost, I still had to boot off the cd or a floppy to access the "hidden" recovery partition (fat 32 no drive or path asigned in windows).

by rob miners

You could try Ptedit32 to expose the Hidden Partition and change it's type to 0C and make it Active, remembering to take note of the original type. You could then Ghost the Recovery Partition. I think that Ghost fails because of the different Partition Types when you try to do the whole drive.
Although this information is for Dell it can be adapted to other Makes. The Compaq Diagnostics is type 12 which is common. Just Partition the New Drive as if it was the old one. If you can get this to work you will save $$.

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/recover.htm
Another link

http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Repair-the-Acer-D2D-Recovery&id=794500

The other alternative as someone has suggested is to just Ghost the OS Partition and use Acronis to create a Restore Partition.

Edit: here is a link to Ptedit32 it is free but you have to sign up.

http://laptop-support.net/

by rob miners

I use Ghost 7 because I reckon that G7 and G7.5 are the best. :)

by dumphrey

but I barely have room on our nas to back up current servers, let alone put client images...

by rob miners

It opened up a whole new world for me. Another thing to have a look at is the WindowsPE environment. PE1 for XP and PE2 for Vista. This is the part that I like.

Recovery. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs) can use Windows PE to build customized, automated solutions for recovering and rebuilding computers running Windows Vista. For example, users can start their computers from Windows PE recovery CDs or recovery partitions to automatically reformat their hard disks and re-install Windows Vista with the original drivers, settings, and applications.

Rob

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