John Greenleaf said:
Thanks Ken.
Still learning, slow but sure. I am glade you mentioned Ghost. I today tried
to run Norton Ghost 2003 and it was an utter disaster. I thought I would try
to make an image of the RAID mirror on the third drive. When Ghost rebooted
to do the clone I got a general protection fault. If I told it to skip the
Ghost and boot XP it came back out of memory. It took some while to get ride
of Ghost. Have you used it? Can it be done?
Thanks
John
Hi John,
I have used Norton Ghost 2003 (as part of my Norton Systemworks 2003
package) for imaging both my RAID Mirror (both drives of course have the
same thing on them), and for my system disk. I do run Windows 2000 SP4
which is relevant perhaps in imaging the system disk but probably not in
imaging your data. I have no experience with Windows XP, especially as it
regards Norton Ghost. It is however my understanding that there are issues
with XP that are not present with W2K. With W2K it is possible to reliably
image a disk PARTITION and then ultimately dump it back onto another disk's
partition or for that matter onto a formatted disk that has only 1
partition. From what I have read in newsgroups (and have not tried or been
able to verify it), with Windows XP Norton Ghost only works if you image the
entire drive that your system partition is on, be it a multipartition disk
or a single partition HD. What I have read is that the imaging process
appears to go normally but that when you try to restore Windows XP it will
not work unless the image has the contents of the entire drive on it. Once
again, I can't verify this so I don't know if I'm just spreading
misinformation.
Here is what I have done, and it works terrifically. I have a SATA HD that
I have partitioned into ~35GB for my system/windows/programs partition.
This is really way more than I need and I could probably have gotten along
just fine with 15 or 20GB which would have allowed plenty of headroom for
the Swap file and also for defragmenting. The balance of that disk I use as
a separate NTFS partition for videos, tv shows from my capture card, Divx
movie clips, etc. If I had no interest in using that extra space, I could
easily have gotten a 37GB WD 10K Raptor SATA drive which would have had some
speed benefits and been plenty big for the system partition.
I have two Maxtor 160GB drives running as a mirror, strictly for data,
scanned images, etc. etc. These are of course on the Via RAID channels, 1
each on each primary channel. The two secondary ide positions on the raid
channels are unoccupied. Then, I have another drive, a WD 160GB 2MB cache
drive which is primary on the regular primary IDE channel. I have this
formatted for NTFS. The purpose of this drive is strictly for ghost images.
It is incredibly fast and easy to make ghost image files onto another hard
disk in the same box, and the P4P800 Deluxe has plenty of ports to plug them
into. The issue here would be one of space in your case. Hard disks are so
unbelievably cheap on rebate deals these days that the expense was secondary
for me. I bought the 160GB 7200rpm WD 2MB cache drive for less than $60 US
on a recent rebate deal from Compusa.com.
As you can see, I have oodles of hard disks in my box, but they were all
purchased ultra-cheaply and recently. If the HDs had cost what HDs were
costing even 6 months ago I would never have even considered this sort of a
setup, but with 120GB drives selling for as low as $40 after rebate, and
160GB drives in the $60 to $80 range, it is pretty cheap to go whole hog. I
especially like two aspects of what I've done: the RAID mirror which offers
data redundancy, plus the separate HD I use for nothing but ghosted images.
If you make a mistake screwing around with your system, if you load some
software that causes problems, it is a pretty simple matter to stick that
ghost boot floppy in the floppy drive and tell ghost to write over your
system partition with your most recent disk image. I make the disk images
about every week (they run maybe 2.5 GB each) so if I have to restore from a
ghosted image it is very quick and I find it very reliable. One thing you
have to do when you make the ghost images is to create a separate directory
for each ghost image file, or you will find that older files get overwritten
even though you have named them differently. But that is a small bone to
pick.
I don't know that I can explain the problems you are having with Ghost. I
think it is best to run ghost off a boot floppy rather than to tell the
program within windows to make a ghost image. This will work best for
restores as well.
Obviously, if you end up imitating any of the aspects of the system I've set
up, you need to be careful with your boot menu in the bios so that you end
up booting from the right disk!
Good luck,
ken
