OK...a little lost again

I use WinImage to create those files with Partition Magic and Ghost program right? Then when I tell Ghost to make spanned images without BOOT IMAGE, I assume you want me to include this image created by WinImage and the actual OS image from the hard drive.

Question about the "bootable" CD. Does it matter if I tell Nero to make it bootable or not if the ghost.exe file is not on that image CD (meaning I will use either the Ghost CD/floppy or your alternative m^e with WinImage)? Or must it be bootable? Just a curious thing on my mind

I hate fdisk also, but why won't it do the job? Maybe for bigger sized hard drives? But I usually work with those under 100GB.

For the Partition Magic files, this is the Rescue Disk right? I never created this disk when asked...maybe I should

Yup absolutely correct.



No it won't matter if you create a non-bootable cd. As long as you have Ghost Rescue Disk - or some other disk that will let you:
1. Boot
2. Use CD Drive
3. Run ghost.exe from somewhere (maybe the same disk itself)
- You're fine.. Once you boot and run Ghost, you can keep putting in the ghost image cds one after the other and restore your partition.

The method I stated - gives you a little more flexibility in the sense that you can Boot, Create/Edit Partitions and then run Ghost and do a restore - all from the same CD/DVD.



Not the partitionmagic rescue disk. When you install partition magic, if you choose Full Install, a partitionmagic for DOS also gets installed in your installation folder. You'll have to pick a couple of files from there .. as far as i remember, PQMAGICDOS.EXE or something similar..

Yordan, what do you mean by "If you try to put it on another system it could fail."
so, there is a chance that i would install properly, too? that would be awesome if i could to that do different hard drives!

and one question:

make as if i am trying to do that restore to a computer that already has an OS installed, will it overwrite it, or will i have an option to have a double boot system?

OK, two questions, two answers.
1) Yes, it happened to work. A backup of my Pentium II worked on a pentiumIII, but a backup of a pentium IV did not work on my Pention III, and a backup of my AMD XP did not work on any pentium system. So, first make a backup of your own system, and if another system crash, you can try to reload your own backup ; if you are lucky, you could be successful.

2) The backup is restored somewhere. I simply replaces your c: disk with the system on the backup CD's. I do this on my dual-boot systems, they remain dual-boot. But the single-boot system remain single-boot systems or simply don't boot.

The only way of having a dual-boot system is starting from scratch. First create two partitions on your hard disk (or use several disks).
a) Install Win98 first on the c: disk.
Boot on the Win2k or WinXP boot-CD and install Windows 2k or Win XP. This will create a dual-boot system, booting on Win98 or on Win2k, as you choose.
c) Boot on the Linux boot-install-CD, ask "install on the remaining free spaced" (the space you left unformatted on your hard drive), it will install LILO which will allow you to
- choose booting on
. Win 98
. Win 2k
. Linux (so, this is a tri-os boot, more than a dual boot!).
- mount the Windows Filesystems on Linux filesystems, sharing files between both worlds.

This starts been somehow far away from the simple initiel "ghost backup" post, so don't worry if you cannot do everything perfectly from your first try. Just try first to make your ghost backup, verify that the image is made from several "small" files fitting on a CD, try to burn the files on CD's (I suggest using CDRW because if you do a mistake you loose no money), try to boot on the ghost bootable CD or on a disquette and try to restore on a sacrifyable system. When this works, we will look a the more complicated things, namely
- making several partitions with or without using fdisk.
- creating dual-boot systems.
Remember once you have a reliable backup, you can do several tests without loosing anything except the time you spend on testing.
Regards
Yordan

Got it all now

This should be (hopefully) my last set of questions for now

I will see if I can get a few of these images created in the office already (these are the images for the different Dell models). Will they have the ghost.exe in the root directory of the hard drive? I see them ghosting them in the office using these external hard drives.

Also, is there a way I can span the images on the external hard drive? I will try to copy those images to my home computer and span them on CDs if that's possible. Or do they have to do it from scratch on the machine with the clean install (with Ghost in it)?

Hate to continually pester with these questions, but just wanted to get them out of the way as soon as I can.

Thanks again

Really the last set ?
OK, let me try to answer some of them. Prior to that, I would suggest you do the full process for a single PC first, before trying to generalize it on several kind of systems.

1) ghost will create the ghost images exactly where you ask to put it. ghost will not add ghost.exe there. You will have to do the job by yourself : verify that the ghost version you have can be put on a floppy disk, or can be activated by a ms-dos bootable floppy disk.

2) If the images are on an external drive, you don't need to span them. You span them if you want to save them on a CD. I do this home, using winrar ( http://www.rarlab.com/ ). You can ask winrar to span a huge file on several smaller files (700 megs if you want to put them on CD's). Be careful, this is only for spanning, you will not be able to restore your backup from these CD's. Then you will have to read the CD's in order to re-create the big ghost image, and ask ghost to restore the system from that big image.

3) So, the best thing is simply to ask ghost to create the ghost image spanned on several files, read your ghost version documentation about how to reload (do you need to use the provided ghost boot-disk or can you simply include ghost.exe in your backup directory) and then try to reload it on a non-important system.

Regards

Yordan

Yes, last set

I will try this out on my laptop...it's time for another format and reinstall anyway

Just one more to clarify this part:
Yes, I want to get them on CDs...otherwise I'll have to wait until they burn it on CDs for us. You said if I span them (using winrar) it won't be able to be restored. How do I restore it then? I don't think I can combine those rar files on a empty/blank hard drive.

That's enough from me I will see if I can get them to span the files using Ghost directly. Need to get my hands on them

Thank you everyone and especially you yordan for the help.

No, I just said that if tho ghost Image is a huge file (for instance 2gig), winrar will be able to span it, but ghost will not be able to use directly the spanned files on CD. This means that you will have to re-create the huge file on an empty partition of your hard disk. One way is using winrar again for reading the small files form CD and re-create the small files.
I simply ask winrar to split the huge file on 700 megs files, in self-extract format. That means, the first file will be an executable file, 700 Megs big. You will simply click on it, and it will ask where you want the huge file to be re-created, read the first CD, read te second one etc.. until the huge file is recreated. Then you ask ghost to restore your operating system from the huge image file.
And, yes, it's rather complicated, that's why I recommend create the ghost image directly in 650 megs splitted files format, it makes everything easier.
Regards
Yordan

It's all crystal clear now yordan

I will try to play around with Ghost this weekend and hopefully no questions will arise...

Thanks again for all the help.

how to create the ghost.
How To Create "ghost" Images (norton) On Windows

I want to install the xp in six systems so how.
What are requirements for this.
How to create the image.

-rathnakar