Stupid GHOST 2003 questions

[Mark Holtz]

I just want to be perfectly clear on this. I'm running Norton Systemworks 2003 Professional which includes Ghost 2003. I'm leaving a hint that I want to have a larger hard drive for Christmas and use the existing 80GB hard drive as a backup drive.

If I understand things correctly, I can formet the drive using NTFS and save the images on that drive. If things go kaplooey, I can still boot off the GHOST Floppy and still be able to read from that drive.

Is there any way to automate the GHOSTing so that backups are performed at 3 AM without user intervention?

[dfergie]

Gosh, dont know on that one as there were no Ghosts ava around my parts...I ordered a Maxtor 250 gig drive and got a program with it that works with any drive...(have used successfully on 2 differant sys's)Max Blast but it will not do what you want.
(not to hijack your thread)

[DonLandis]

I use Ghost all the time here. It is really the best way to recover a C drive (boot drive)

The way I do it is I set up a formated drive bigger than the C Drive as disk 1. In dos lingo your boot drive is disk 0.

Then you install Norton Ghost from the CD's and run it, specifying the Disk 1 as the new ghost drive. It will create an exact replica of the C drive on the your new drive. Then all you do is take out the Disk 0 (C drive original) and move your new drive with the Ghost clone as a boot drive. This usually requires a change of the jumper. By using IDE disk 0 and 1 you avoid the need to think about Firewire or USB drivers in Ghost and can simple use all the default stuff. This makes life easier. With Maxtor drives no jumper is slave and jumper first set of pins is Master. You may decide to put your old 80G drive in as a D drive. I even have ghosrt drives for all 3 of my laptops sitting on the shelf. To do those, I use a 2.5" drive to standard IDE adapter board and do the ghost clone in my desktop.

Now having said all that, because I believe that is what you wanted. I do not recommend that process. In fact, I prefer to keep my C drove at about 60 G and then I have a stack of high capacity, usually 250G drives as just data drives. The reason is you rarely should store basic data, AKA non applications on the C drive.
I feel the safest for what I call mission critical systems is to have a 60G C drive with no data, just applications. and then keep an updated Ghost 60G drive in the case ready to swap out should the C drive go dead. IT's the fastest way to do disaster recovery when you are under the gun of a deadline.
Another great tool I use here for disaster recovery of my data drives, since I rarely back them up is a product called File Scavenger. It will recover your data from a corrupt drive sector by sector as long as you stop everything when you discover the loss. It takes a few hours to use but it is well worth it to have handy. I have recovered about 1.5 TB of video data with this product and have not lost a single file since using it. In other words, when the drive access says "Drive appears to not be formatted" I stop and run File Scavenger. Seems the only time this doesn't work is when the drive is electrically dead.


RE 3Am ghosting. I don't see the purpose of this. If you manage your data and applications properly, you should only need to ghost your C drive once after you add some new application or do a major update like SP2. The Ghost process is not like a backup. Even if you don't manage your data well, you could stiull do a standard data files backup with a product like Novaback to another hard drive and then just keep the Ghost drive image on a spare second drive in case you ever need that two. For me, I don't usually have the time to do a recovery, that is why I need the spare hard drive ready to swap out in a few minutes.

[Mark Holtz]

Well, I got the drive installed. My primary (work) drive is still the 80GB drive, while the 250GB is acting as the backup drive. I'm only using about 40% of my 80GB drive now. The 250GB is going to be holding the backup images.

What I may try to do, after making the backup, is wiping the 80GB drive and putting in a copy of Linux and play around with that. Get Lilo up and running sometime later. Gotta read up on how to set up multi-boot partitions.

[P Smith]

I would recommend to install VMware - you could run many OSes same time from same disk ! No LILO, no wiping, no reformatting and all your systems are at your fingers.