External Hard drive-ghosting

[Darrell]

I have a USB 2.0 40GB Hard drive that I would like to use for backup using
Ghost. My C: drive is NTFS. Should I also make my external drive NTFS for
compatibility? My BIOS is set up to boot from USB. I also have GoBack on
my C: drive. Should I deactivate that before ghosting my C: drive to my
external? Deactivation will lose its memory so I don't want to do that
unless I have to.

 

[James Martin]

It doesn't matter what format you choose for the USB drive.
Ghost will either backup to a file or a partition, and all
NTFS settings will be retained in a file, a partition will
duplicate the existing partition exactly. You don't have
to even partition the external drive if you're copying the
partition.

When you ghost your boot drive, it will reboot and perform
the ghosting, so all the GoBack files will be copied as
well, you shouldn't need to disable it. Your bios should
boot up from USB only if that's how you want to boot. If
it tries your other locations first then just leave it be.

-Regards

 

[Darrell]

It doesn't matter what format you choose for the USB drive.
Ghost will either backup to a file or a partition, and all
NTFS settings will be retained in a file, a partition will
duplicate the existing partition exactly. You don't have
to even partition the external drive if you're copying the
partition.

When you ghost your boot drive, it will reboot and perform
the ghosting, so all the GoBack files will be copied as
well, you shouldn't need to disable it. Your bios should
boot up from USB only if that's how you want to boot. If
it tries your other locations first then just leave it be.

I have boot from USB active in my BIOS but all my USB stuff is powered from
a separate power station. I normally leave it off unless I have a need for
it. That way I can leave USB boot active but it won't do anything unless I
purposely leave them powered. I have a USB ZIP drive that I use for my
Quicken backups. Once I had it powered with my zip disk in during a restart
and got the old "disk not bootable" warning. I removed the disk and hit a
key and it booted normally.

Thanks for all that info, James.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have a USB 2.0 40GB Hard drive that I would like to use for backup using
Ghost. My C: drive is NTFS. Should I also make my external drive NTFS for
compatibility? My BIOS is set up to boot from USB.

It is not necessary for a backup such as this to be onto the same type
of file system, and if you should want to boot from the USB drive it
would be more flexible as a FAT 32 one. I'm not quite sure what Ghost
provides as a bootable restore program, which is presumably what you
have in mind, but if you put anything bootable onto the USB drive it
must *not* be first in the boot order of BIOS for normal use,