Can I use Ghost to repartition my drive?

[Philip Herlihy]

Not having fully grasped the nicer points of backups versus disk-imaging
when I set up my laptop, I kept all 60Gb in a single partition.

Now I want to keep OS and Apps in one place (for imaging) and data in
another (for normal incremental backups) and I want to subdivide my disk.

If I image the partition (currently 19Gb), can I safely format, repartition
and then restore the 19Gb to (say) a 30Gb partition? Or does the Ghost
image contain partition information that would give me grief?

 

[Bob Harris]

There is a fine point to using GHOST. If you backup the whole disk, as a
disk, then the size of the disk is included and the image will re-expand to
fill the space. That is the expanded image will contain blank space, a lot
of it. But, if you backup the C:\ partition as a partition (not as a
disk), the only requirement is that the new partition be as large as the
files in the expanded image. Ever since making this mistake once, I have
always backed up by partition instead whole disk, even if the disk has only
one partition.

Avoid the -IA and/or -IB option of GHOST as they force the whole disk to go
to the image.

However, there is one (small) potential drawback to partition images. You
lose the information in the boot record. Normally this is of no concern.
However, some clever schemes for copy protection store information on the
boot record, and if the info goes, so does you ability to use the program.
Fortunately, XP is NOT one of those. In fact the only one of which I am
aware is Turbo Tax for tax year 2002 (not 2003).

 

[Philip Herlihy]

Thanks for the alert. I think there may even be an option to include the
boot record - I'll look into it.

Sounds like this will work... (famous last words)