Hi, I'm tired of wasting so much time on a site when I have to reinstall Windows from scratch. Want to speed up the process a little since I have to install Windows XP, any Service Packs, Norton Antivirus and Microsoft AntiSpyware for the computers. I want to create images of good working Window states, but have some questions.

1. How much faster would this be compared to reinstalling everything manually? I will be doing this from an external hard drive.

2. What are the chances of an image not working assuming that the image created is good? I heard that these may fail sometimes (images doesn't look properly?).

3. If/When I get this working, do I just plug in the external USB hard drive to the computer and boot from USB (maybe change in BIOS boot sequence)?

4. Can I install Windows XP to a blank external hard drive and ghost it from there? I have a laptop here and don't want to wipe it out just for that.

I didn't play around too much with ghosting hard drives and only know so much on how to use it (and that's on a CD). One last question for now. Which program do you prefer to use: Norton Ghost or Acronis TrueImage? Just know of those two that are available (probably better well known).

Thanks.

This post has been edited by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG: Nov 18 2005, 08:54 AM

Norton Ghost is the best as far as i have heard people say, infact MANY people use it. Its good and safe too.

As for the image making, i suggest you install the the OS and all the stuff you need on one computer and use norton to make a ghost of that drive. Save the ghost image on a USB HDD, with the files required to run norton on system boot. You will have to read the FAQ of norton for that. Then boot from you USB HDD and go accourding to the screen.

A Ghost takes half the amount of time you would need to install a full OS with the required softwares. I dont think you would come accross a problem of a corrupt image as long as your HDD stays intact and secure.

Hope this little info of mine would help, but you will have more feedbacks to decide.

Regards
Dhanesh.

PowerQuest Drive Images works fine too. You do a copy somewhere on a hard disk or on a DVD-ROM. Then, in case of system crash you install back your system from this backup. usually it lasts five to ten minutes.
Of course, you should backup a correctly working system...
Regards
Yordan

I will do this from scratch for the image...know that part already If I had Windows XP, XP SP2, Norton Antivirus and Microsoft AntiSpyware in the ghost image, how long (approximately) would it take to load this image onto another hard drive? Last time I did this manually it took over 2 hours

Never used PowerQuest's Drive Image before. I have Partition Magic 8. Is this the same as ghosting the drive (like Norton Ghost)?

Thanks.

Last time I did, booting on floppy and loading the image from disk, it took me about five minutes (remaining time 5 minutes, then 4 minutes, then reboot). So, neglectible time compared to two hours.
And I do this frequently (about once a week) because of system crashes due to spywares, unwanted anstalls and other unwanted things.

Yup - 4-5mins.. that's about the time it takes on an average to restore a partition containing 1.5 Gigs of data. My Norton Ghost backup restores in just under 4 mins.. I got WinXP, OfficeXP, VS.NET2003 and hundreds of other everyday utilities.

Only headache is the image creation process - which doesn't give you the option of breaking the image into spanned files and then writing to CDs. If you want disk-spannng with Norton Ghost you've to backup directly to the CD, which gives rise to a whole lot of mal-formed image errors. I've wasted more than 15-20 CDs in one sitting before I grew wiser. Moreover, everytime your Image recording fails somewhere miday, you've to start from the beginning of the series again (assuming it spans beyond one CD).. this is a massive wastage of time and cds.

The best alternative is to backup to a single file on some other partition - and then on a blank DVD write this file, along with ghost.exe (from the installation directory) and make this DVD bootable. This will enable to you directly boot from this DVD, run ghost.exe (or put it in autoexec.bat) and install directly.

ALSO - never forget to do a Image Verification check after the ghost image has been created. Ghost has a default option which you can turn on, so that this check is auto-performed everytime you create an image.

In case you lack a software that'll enable you to put the content of your liking onto your bootable part of the CD, try WinImage (http://www.winimage.com) - which lets you write out flopply images in a wide variety of formats, with your own selection of boot files. This image can be written directly onto a floppy, or be saved as an .ima file, which can then be used to create a Boot CD/DVD.

As for your 4th question - you can create a ghost image of ANY partition that can be read from Windows. That includes your external drive. But remember - if you want to ghost that partition and put that image on your main drive - your partition sizes on both need to be same. Moreover, from your external HDD - the boot sector of that partition will be copied over - not your own MBR which is used for booting. So the windows replaced from this ghost image won't be able to boot.



They both should work on the same principle. I've used the Drive Image of Acronis Disk Director Suite earlier on and the basic functionality was the same as Ghost.

Conclusion: Use something like Ghost to backup a working set of your OS and regularly used applications. After-crash restorations become a mere breeze.

Nope ! that's false.
I create all my backups in 700 Megs splitted files, so that they fit on a CD. PowerQuest Drive images does it, and I did with with Norton Ghost too. It's hidden somewhere, probably in some "advanced mode" submenus, but it's in the software. It creates a single backup in several files, for people having only a CD Burner. Which is logic : each backup must be made two ways, on two different media. So, if you loose your second hard drive, you still have a CD backup. More over, this CD backup must NOT be in your office, just in case of major catastrophy. Ask your best friend for storing your system backups second chance CD's.

Whoa, that will definitely make my day...5 minutes compared to two hours!!!

Just need to clear a few more things though. If I want to create this image and save it on a external hard drive, can I just tell the ghost program to do this instead of saving them to CDs/DVDs? Will this impact the part where you mentioned that the partition sizes should be the same? What I want to do now is to install Windows XP Pro, XP SP2, Norton Antivirus and Microsoft AntiSpyware. Then create a ghost image of this and save it to my external hard drive. Does it matter what size the partition is for the hard drive I will be installing the ghost image to now? This will be a big problem if it does matter because the sites I go to have hard drives of different sizes and they usually either have one partition or two at most.

Can I install XP Pro on a new external hard drive? I have my laptop here and don't want to format it just to create this clean ghost image. Or, will it work if I create another partition on my laptop for this install and create a ghost image to save to my external hard drive? The drive letter probably won't be c: drive since I have Windows XP Home on my c: drive, d: drive is for my other data, e: and f: are for other external devices. So if I install it on the g: drive partition, will do have any adverse effect on the ghost image installing on a computer meant to be on the c: drive?

Just want to get these questions out of the way before I proceed with this. It would be such a relief that all this can be done under 10 minutes. Is it 5 minutes loading image from hard disk or CD/DVD? Should I copy that ghost.exe file for the hard drive also? So many questions I might try spanning it to 1 or 2 CDs also.

One last question. Booting from USB hard drive...will this work for most of the more recent computers? Otherwise I might just have to do with the CD method. If I choose the CD method, how would I go about doing this to make it bootable? I will probably need more than one CD since it will have XP Pro and XP SP2 which in themselves take up a bunch of space already...not to mention Norton Antivirus. I will see if I can buy a older version of Norton Ghost or get one from work since they have licenses for these.

Thanks again for the help. No more waiting for Windows to install...what a relief

A lot of questions in in a single post. Let me try to answer some of them.
First of all, the "size" question. On my "small" systems, a ghost backup is one or two 700 megs files. I put them in any partition of any hard disk (usually on the d: partition of the first hard disk). Of course, do not do this on the c: disk, which will be destroyed when restoring...
On my big XP systems, the backup is 3.5 gig wide, so I need to put it somewhere where I have at least 4 gig free.

Secondly, how to install it ? Really simple. I boot on a ms-dos disquette (a bootable CD for the system which has no floppy disk reader). Then I go to the d: disk, "cd \backup", and there I have ghost and I start it. And then it asks me from which backup to reload, I choose the last backup I have, and then I say put it on the "c:" disk.

Thirdly : a ghost backup is designed for being restored on the same system (same hardware, same disk). If you try to put it on another system it could fail.

Regards

Yordan

My apologies for the abundant questions. Was just so curious about this.

Yes, I don't know why it didn't occur to me initially about that. Image must be for same system (hardware-wise) So I guess there's no way to image Windows without copying all the chipset drivers etc...?

I will be using CDs to do this since they are more reliable. Will need to get this from the office (*sigh* so many different machines to image).

yordan, is there a way to copy a ghost image on a CD? The guys at the office want to make our lives easier by giving us the images, but there's over 50 of us technicians and they tried using Nero, Roxio, CloneCD, etc. and none seem to be able to copy the CD images correctly. They have to use Ghost create a new image and burn it to CDs individually. Any way around this? These are all the same thing except they are for different Dell machines.

Thanks.