Ghosting to an external hard drive?

[t.cruise]

For a small business: I don't have a bay for a second hard drive. Can an internal hard
drive be ghosted to an external hard drive, and then the internal hard drive replaced, and
the image be applied to the new internal drive? If so, how? And, which external hard
drive would you recommend (reliability and speed), and which ghosting program? The system
is a new Dell with Windows HE SP2.

 

[David H. Lipman]

Yes. You can hook up just about any external USB v2.0 or FireWire hard disk subsystem.

You would create a Ghost Boot disk (CDROM or floppy).
You would then boot from the Ghost boot Disk and create an image of drive "C:" on the
external drive "D:".

If the "C:" drive should fail, you do the above in reverse.
You would then boot from the Ghost boot Disk and restore the image of on the external drive
"D:" to the "C:" drive.

There is only one Ghosting program -- Symantec Ghost. There are others that "image" drives
but only one "Ghost".

I suggest Symantec Ghost 2003.

Dave




| For a small business: I don't have a bay for a second hard drive. Can an internal hard
| drive be ghosted to an external hard drive, and then the internal hard drive replaced, and
| the image be applied to the new internal drive? If so, how? And, which external hard
| drive would you recommend (reliability and speed), and which ghosting program? The system
| is a new Dell with Windows HE SP2.
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|
| T.C.
| t__cruise@[NoSpam]hotmail.com
| Remove [NoSpam] to reply
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[CS]

For a small business: I don't have a bay for a second hard drive. Can an internal hard
drive be ghosted to an external hard drive, and then the internal hard drive replaced, and
the image be applied to the new internal drive? If so, how? And, which external hard
drive would you recommend (reliability and speed), and which ghosting program? The system
is a new Dell with Windows HE SP2.

The answer to your first set of questions is yes. (I use this method
for backup on three machines).

The "how" of it depends on which imaging software you choose. I have
personally tried (and own) Drive Image, Ghost, BING, and lastly True
Image. I highly recommend True Image 8.0 from Acronis.
www.acronis.com

As for an external hard drive recommendation, that's going to be very
subjective. I have had good results with an external Maxtor USB 2.0
drive that I currently use. Probably a bit outdated since it's small
in comparison to the drives that are now popular.

BTW, Acronis True Image 8.0 creates a rescue boot CD that can
completely restore images. It even contains its own USB 2.0 and
Firewire drivers so that those drivers need not be loaded by the OS or
from the BIOS.