R
Rod Speed
Finally got around to having a look at Ghost 9 and True Image
for cloning a drive, usually used when upgrading the OS boot
drive and whatever other partitions are on that drive.
The short story is that Ghost 9 is close to
useless and True Image leaves it for dead.
You cant use the bootable CD to clone a drive with Ghost 9,
you have to use the installed Ghost 9. With True Image you
can boot the bootable CD and do it all from there. The only
real downside with TI in this area is that it offers two choices,
clone a drive, and add a new hard drive. It isnt immediately
obvious what the difference is. In practice the second option
is used when you just want to prepare a new drive with new
partitions, and dont want to clone an existing drive to it.
With Ghost 9 with a source drive with multiple partitions, you have
to clone each one individually, you cant clone the entire physical drive.
With TI you can choose to have it proportionally expand each
partition when the new drive is bigger than the original, as it
usually is. You can also manually specify the new partition
sizes. Its a tad clumsy in this area, it initially offers the
proportionally expanded partition layout and you have to
fiddle with the individual sizes and it uses a rather odd way
of specifying the location on the drive, with free space
specified before and after each partition. Usable, but a bit crude.
The very fundamental problem with Ghost 9 is that its damned
slow, and failed to clone one of my partitions. It got to 99%
complete with one of the partitions and then just stopped updating
the display. Didnt affect the use of the system, but there wasnt any
way to get it to complete the clone. It did the other partition fine, both
data partitions. Didnt try to update Ghost 9 from the Symantec site,
I was sick of the lousy speed and crude approach by then having
pissed most of the morning against the wall getting nowhere.
And it isnt at all clear what would happen to the drive letters,
presumably they could get into one hell of a mess, tho likely
that would be fixable after the cloning had been done. The
issue doesnt arise with TI since it isnt cloning at the XP level.
TI cloned the entire 120G drive in less time than
Ghost took to clone just one of the 40G partitions
on that drive, and worked too, which is a useful bonus.
The manual says that you have to remove the original,
and the clone booted up fine when that was done.
XP didnt find new hardware like it does if you do a
clone with Ghost 2003, just booted up fine.
Presumably TI molests the MBR etc so it keeps
XP happy, tho I didnt check that carefully.
The only real downside with TI is that since its running from
the booted CD, you cant play freecell etc while its cloning.
TI wont boot the CD on all PCs tho, it fails on one
dinosaur I have, the screen is completely unreadable.
Presumably they will fix that eventually.
for cloning a drive, usually used when upgrading the OS boot
drive and whatever other partitions are on that drive.
The short story is that Ghost 9 is close to
useless and True Image leaves it for dead.
You cant use the bootable CD to clone a drive with Ghost 9,
you have to use the installed Ghost 9. With True Image you
can boot the bootable CD and do it all from there. The only
real downside with TI in this area is that it offers two choices,
clone a drive, and add a new hard drive. It isnt immediately
obvious what the difference is. In practice the second option
is used when you just want to prepare a new drive with new
partitions, and dont want to clone an existing drive to it.
With Ghost 9 with a source drive with multiple partitions, you have
to clone each one individually, you cant clone the entire physical drive.
With TI you can choose to have it proportionally expand each
partition when the new drive is bigger than the original, as it
usually is. You can also manually specify the new partition
sizes. Its a tad clumsy in this area, it initially offers the
proportionally expanded partition layout and you have to
fiddle with the individual sizes and it uses a rather odd way
of specifying the location on the drive, with free space
specified before and after each partition. Usable, but a bit crude.
The very fundamental problem with Ghost 9 is that its damned
slow, and failed to clone one of my partitions. It got to 99%
complete with one of the partitions and then just stopped updating
the display. Didnt affect the use of the system, but there wasnt any
way to get it to complete the clone. It did the other partition fine, both
data partitions. Didnt try to update Ghost 9 from the Symantec site,
I was sick of the lousy speed and crude approach by then having
pissed most of the morning against the wall getting nowhere.
And it isnt at all clear what would happen to the drive letters,
presumably they could get into one hell of a mess, tho likely
that would be fixable after the cloning had been done. The
issue doesnt arise with TI since it isnt cloning at the XP level.
TI cloned the entire 120G drive in less time than
Ghost took to clone just one of the 40G partitions
on that drive, and worked too, which is a useful bonus.
The manual says that you have to remove the original,
and the clone booted up fine when that was done.
XP didnt find new hardware like it does if you do a
clone with Ghost 2003, just booted up fine.
Presumably TI molests the MBR etc so it keeps
XP happy, tho I didnt check that carefully.
The only real downside with TI is that since its running from
the booted CD, you cant play freecell etc while its cloning.
TI wont boot the CD on all PCs tho, it fails on one
dinosaur I have, the screen is completely unreadable.
Presumably they will fix that eventually.