Is there more reliable imaging program than Ghost?

[InXess]

Errors that you got (don't know details) are typical to compatibility issues. As I recall with DriveImage you could reimage XP drive, all files seemed to be there yet the loader wouldn't start XP. Wonder why? This is because the partition was not created properly for XP environment (again, references on Symantec website). It may very well be something we have missed here but surely it reminds me of DriveImage issues I 've had. Switched to TrueImage. Voila. Keep in mind that new ver. of Drive Image works well but I don't like it due to a very pesky VxD they employ. (read user issues on Symantec website). You may find the answer to your Ghost issues also there as both are property of Symantec now.
Personally, I think you're right, boot.ini is not the problem. Your setup is very simple and it mirrors the original config. So the image should be perfect as well. I used to fix image problems like this by running NTsetup up to the moment it asks you for the first reboot (fixes loader and all sys files in root dir). Then you need to jump in 2 sec window to the boot option you want and if it works wipe out residual setup info. Bit convoluted but a quick fix and worked all the time.
Btw. you may finish NTsetup with the repair option and you're good to go.
It will fix what your Ghost has missed.

[bevills1]

My retest of Ghost showed some reliability, some flakiness and some needed improvement as well as one failure which I expected. The expected failure was from imagiing from one partition type to another, specifically from an extended partition on one drive to a primary partition on another drive. The same errors were given in the retest as in my original posted problem. I suspect this may be due to Windows system files and/or registry reporting things differently when on different partition types which is no fault of Ghost. Flakiness was related to the PC DOS included in my Ghost 2002 which halted the image creation when 2 GB size was reached, and it gave error message there was not enough space on the partition on which the image was being created even though there were over 26 GB of free space on that partition. Using a Windows 98 DOS floppy worked around this problem, but those without access to Windows 98 could have more problems. This work around resulted in successfull imaging of Windows 98 and 2000 by both partition to partition and partition to image methods as long as transfers were to same partition type, i.e. extended to extended and primary to primary. A problem was encountered for the Windows 98 image to partition resulting in disk boot failure when restarting system after imaging. However, booting to Windows 98 startup disk and running setup from Windows 98 CD fixed that problem, and all updates and applications were in tact once that problem was fixed. Both DOS versions seem to have the same 137 GB limit that Windows Me and earlier versions have because neither DOS recognized capacity above 137 GB on the 200 GB drive. Needed improvment in Ghost regarding USB support since it didn't recognize or couldn't locate USB drivers which made it impossible to test partition to external USB drive which would be most convenient method IMO. Another nice Ghost improvement would be to add RW support for CDRW and add DVD support. My 2002 Ghost version would recognize no CDRW disc nor any DVD media. Some may wonder why I spent so much effort on this, but I simply want to know what works and what doesn't to make things easier in the long run. The approaches which I found to work reliably takes 10 to 15 minutes approximately instead of the 6 to 8 hours it takes to reinstall Windows, Windows updates and all applications.

[RLT69]

Flakiness was related to the PC DOS included in my Ghost 2002 which halted the image creation when 2 GB size was reached, and it gave error message there was not enough space on the partition on which the image was being created even though there were over 26 GB of free space on that partition.

This is a strange error. I have done partition copies that exceeded 2GB and had no error with PC DOS Ghost boot disk. The version I was using was Ghost 2003. Maybe there's a difference between the two versions.

Needed improvment in Ghost regarding USB support since it didn't recognize or couldn't locate USB drivers which made it impossible to test partition to external USB drive which would be most convenient method IMO. Another nice Ghost improvement would be to add RW support for CDRW and add DVD support. My 2002 Ghost version would recognize no CDRW disc nor any DVD media.

Check your documentation for external burner support. Ghost 2003 supports DVD burners via USB/Firwire. In fact 2001 supported Firewire CD Burners. GHost 2001 supported CD RW and Ghost 2003 supports DVD RW. Thus 2002 should have supported a USB CD burner. I'm not sure about its DVD burner support.

Perhaps you didn't make the boot disk properly? Just a guess. Obviously you need to make a bootdisk that supports an external burner. The make boot disk options gives you several choices as to the type of boot disk you can make.

[bevills1]

Is the Ghost USB only for external USB burners, or will it work for external USB HDD which is how I'd like to use it? I tried Ghost USB approach on another system just to see if it'd work, and it recognized and found USB drivers on that system. This seems to indicate Ghost should work with USB if compatible drivers are present on a system. I'll try USB HDD cloning when I get the drive back to that system location if Ghost will work with USB HDD. For the failed CDRW attempt I had used InCD formatted CDRW. I repeated imaging with unformatted CDRW, and that worked. Then I retried using DVD media with Ritek 4X DVD+RW, Ritek G04 -R, TDK 8X -R and Ritek 8X Arita +R which all failed, but I finally had success with Ritek 8X G05 +R discs. This seems to indicate Ghost is very limited on DVD supported media. All above DVD media work well for DVD backup and data DVD burned on the same NEC 3520A burner used with Ghost imaging attempts.

[RLT69]

Is the Ghost USB only for external USB burners, or will it work for external USB HDD which is how I'd like to use it?

I'm not sure if Ghost 2002 will work with a USB hard drive. I'm not sure about 2003 or later versions. Ghost would definitely need a driver to use your USB hard drive. If you can locate a DOS USB driver, then you probably could edit the Ghost boot disk and tell it to use the USB HD driver instead of the cd burner. I think that would work. This assumes that the make bootdisk option does not contain an option to make a bootdisk disk for external HDs.

Do not use a formated CDRW disk. You want to use an unformatted disk. Though I am suprised Ghost did not erase the CDRW - perhaps it's a setting.

The DVD media problem is a stumper. Media support is typically the fault of the burner, not the software. If you can use that media in other applications, it should work in Ghost. Unless you have some faulty disks - which believe it or not is possible, even from the same pack! I had that happen, bad disc among good ones from same spindle.

[INFRATOM]

You didn't say which version you used. Drive image was used to be many peoples favorite but Symantecs bought it and discontinued it for Ghost.
Ghost has always been the king but complicated. Drive image still works well, but you have to get the new versions so it could backup NTFS partitions. Also when you copy to another HD partion size must be same if bigger you have to adjust and it maybe tricky. It is easier to use the utility that comes with new HD to transfer.

[lordsmurf]

I still save to give this a try: http://www.drive-backup.com/
Demo here http://drive-backup.com/demo.htm

[cerburus]

Does True Image require activation?

[bevills1]

It may be easier to use the utility that comes with new HD to transfer as INFRATOM suggests for a new drive, but I've needed to do fresh Windows install on existing drive several times due to unresolvable Windows problems. Ghost, True Image and similar programs are needed to easily clone a known good image which avoids need to reinstall OS, updates and all apps anew.

[dipstick]

I'm a big supporter of Ghost. I've succesfuly used it for years restoring countless systems.

However, lately I've been playing around with Bart-PE. It's a Windows emulation CD that you can make. Basically you boot from it and it runs a 32-bit windows OS with various programs you put in there. It runs off the CD so you can run it on any PC. It came with a free trial of SnapShot Drive Imager. I gotta say I really like it a lot. The Bart-PE has full support for external drives and it's very easy to save Restore Image to external drives. SnapShot will let you write the image to NTFS drive and is much faster than Ghost. I imaged my Laptop OS (4 GIGS) in less than 5 min saving it to external USB 2.0 HDD. I restored it in the same time averaging 600 MB/S.

[ark]

I have been using Norton Ghost for many years to back-up/restore/clone HD partitions and never had any problem.

Lately I used GHOST 2003 to get support for imaging NTFS partitions in my son's LAPTOP running WinXP(NTFS system) . Only thing one has to remember is that the GHOST program runs in DOS, so I created & used the GHOST in a Win98SE partition and create images in the same partition.

Regarding missing/corrupt files in the restored partition, it is easy enough to verify in advance the integrity of the created image before using it to restore a partition. Image checking is included in GHOST. The same facility can be used to verify the integrity of the burned image on the CD or DVD

Original recovery disks provided by TOSHIBA were on 2 CDs(they also use GHOST imaging, I found). I created a recovery DVD (- it had to be bootable and had to use Win98SE booting -) without any problem.

I do not imagine a company like TOSHIBA settling for something which is not ROBUST and extremely compact like GHOST.

[bevills1]

Will Bart-PE run in Windows 2000? Google search results indicate it will, but it gives error message that it must be used wiith XP SP1 or Server 2003 or later on 5 different versions tried. I wanted to use it for external USB HDD cloning on the PC for which Ghost can't find or is incompatible with USB drivers.

[dipstick]

Bart-PE will run on any PC. You need to boot up with it in the drive. Don't insert the disk when runing an OS. It might work that way, but it's made to use as a boot disk.

It's pretty complicated to make though. I'm pretty sure you'll need a slipstream XP with SP1 or SP2 disk to create the Bart-PE. There's instructions on the guy's site on how to make it. Once it's made, you can use it on any PC with no problems. You can put in some custom programs that can run in the Bart-PE 32 bit OS. It runs a little slower, because it's running from a big RamDrive, but it works incredible well. It comes with some apps already like a nice little Explorer Clone that you can use to rescue files to external drives or whatever. I like to use it to delete the PageFile before I make a Backup image to reduce the file size. I added a lot of other apps like Partition Magic 8, Irfanview, Nero 6, McAfee VirusScan and others.

I actually put all my Restore images on a DVD+R that I convert into a Bart-PE. It boots into Bart-PE, where I then choose wich restore image I want. It makes a great backup to my external drives.

[bevills1]

Bart PE CD made which boots, but I see no Explorer Clone. Do you create Ghost image of OS partition to DVD first and then burn pebuilder.iso to that DVD, or how do you make it into a Bart PE disc? I assume it can copy Ghost image of OS partition to external drive. Is this correct?

[bevills1]

While making updated image of a partition in Ghost, I noticed my USB connected external drive shows up in Ghost as a source from which to restore an image, but it doesn't show up as a choice to which to clone an image. Have other Ghost users experienced this anomolly or have any suggestions to correct it? It appears to clone to an external drive one would have to first clone to internal PC drive and then copy image file to external drive.

For the Bart PE I found a build with instructions at http://www.ubcd4win.com/ which includes CD burning, anti-virus, anti-spyware, backup, explorer, cloning and other utilities for any interested. Its cloning program is nice in so far as it can all be done from booting to Bart PE CD with no need to install Ghost, create bootable floppy, reboot to floppy, etc. which is required for Ghost, but it clones not only files but all free partition space as well which takes much longer than Ghost if partition is much larger than than files on the partition which is normally the circumstance. I presume this also means it could not restore to a partition smaller than source partition even though space occupied by files may be a fraction of the partition size.

[beam_brandon]

Hello!

I have been using Acronis True Image for several months and, if I had to choose again, I would still choose it. Right now, it is very actively supported with regular patches and very responsive official support in online forums and by email. It helped me almost after I bought it: my system crashed but I was able to restore it thanks to ATI!

I had a chance to try Ghost 9 and although it works fine, I find TI blows it out of the water in terms of speed and general ease of use. It's quicker, the compression ratios seem better (smaller backups), the feature set is richer and the interface is more intuitive for most users.
Two thumbs up for ATI from this user

[kenmo]

I've used both... Acronis True Image is much, much better then Ghost....

[BobK]

Does True Image require activation?

I don't know about version 9, but as of version 8 it didn't.

[bevills1]

Will True Image run in Bart PE?

[INFRATOM]

Ghost is now (or Was) top of the line imaging SW , I preferred Drive Image but it was bought and replaced by Symantec Ghost. There are many programs out there including Nero or NT backup that comes with your windows. In general if any file is open under windows will not copy correctly so any good program should exit to DOS ( or else) and do the copy. It depends on your purpose, if changing HD use the utility that comes with the drive it is easier. Your bios may not recognize this as boot HD and say missing this or that .. then you need to correct your boot.ini , if you are backing up partition if you restore it could be tricky it may hide a part of it then you need partition magic .. to make the story short it is better to get used to the most popular one that everyone uses ... for support and available info ..

[bevills1]

Today I realized my System Works 2003 Corporate Edition includes Ghost 2003 which sees external USB drive as both source and destination choices, and the 2003 DOS version with it works with no problems unlike the 2002 version which works past 2 GB image size only if Win98 DOS was used. In addition the 2003 version doesn't require license number entry like 2002 version does. Ghost 2003 is a vast improvement over Ghost 2002, does everything it should do very easily and as expected, and one couldn't ask for anything more from an imaging program IMO. I'd never have needed to post question here if I'd began with Ghost 2003 instead of 2002, but I learned a lot from all the input from everyone. Ghost is truly a great cloning program if you have a later version like 2003 or higher IMHO.

[dream_of_luck1]

We use ghost at work and I absolutely hate it. Those guys think that it is great but they have never used Acronis. I am going to take it in one day just to show them just how much better it really is. Besides Acronis can be found pretty cheap... such as $25-35 and it's worth every penny. As to support team you can wait an answer from Symantec for ages whereas Acronis has a great support: once one guy worked with me for the whole two days and even got developers to take part in the assistance!

[ark]

bevillis1

I am glad your problems are over using GHOST2003. I said so on 3-Mar-06