@WeaponX : not sure I really understand what you want to do with your CD's.
Here is what I do.
I ask ghost to split (choosing "splitting", "autoname") the ghost image in 680 megs files.
then, I have one or five files, depending from the system i am backing up.
Then, I use nero to burn the first image (image.gho) on a CD. Then I ask nero to burn the second image (image.g02) on a CD. Etc...
I usually put ghost on the first CD and make it bootable, so I boot on the CD, I type "ghost", I choose my image named "image", it asks me which disk to re-write to, when finished it asks for the second CD, etc...
This is the worst way to do it, and the safest way.
The fastest way is to leave the files on the D: disk, boot from floppy, and ask ghost to load the images on the D disk, it loads the first 680 megs image, and automatically continues with the second one, etc...
Just try it next time you install a system from scratch. Do this just after finishing installing Windows (no risk, you can loose only time) : do the ghost image, see the size of the image, and redo it if the size is too big, asking for splitting the image on 680 Megs files.
Then boot on a floppy and restart ghost, and restore your system from your image.
Then, do something strange (removing /windows/drivers for instance), and reload from your ghost image and verify that everything is OK.
And then, do a very complex install, do an image backup. And verify that you are able to restore that image.
I did it on a system I could be able to sacrify, I had to install it for a collegue who needed it three days later. So I had three days for playing with install, crash, reload. And then I got experience with backing up and restoring.
And that kind of experience you can get easily.
Regards

Yordan

I've used acronis trueimage. it creates perfect backups or ghost images, clones hard disks, whatever you want, and you can split the files however you want. flawless (for me) backups and restorations so far.

Here's what i do (like everything else computer related, involves the use of *nix)

You will need, either a space disk (or some free space on a spare disk)
or a second computer.

Install Windows, with service packs and all, get it in a perfect state.

then take a snapshot of the disk image.

If you have 2 computers.........



[/code]

Awesome qwiji.. that's pimp as hell. Never thought of doing it that way

I think thats the best feedback ive ever had !

Dont you just love the black arts of Unix piped scripts.
With all the GUI's around today, people tend to think your performing miracles by pipeing programs together.

Windows has all these fancy programs to backup disk images, make virtual CD's etc etc etc.

and all you need is 'cat' and 'gzip' piped together.. (possably with 'netcat' to add a pimp factor )

really nice.
But... what is nc ? Is ist a standard Linux program ? I knew wc ("word count"), but nc ? "Network Computer" ? "Nice & Cheap" ?

"nc" is netcat.

its just like the program "cat" except it reads and writes to network sockets instead of files.

simlar to telnet, except it treats all data passed through it as raw binary data.

you couldnt use telnet to pass a disk through a network, it would interpret things like EOF EOL \n \r \0 as ends of lines files etc etc and corrupt the filesystem.

I often use netcat to transfere files across networks when i cant be bothered to setup an ftp server or samab.

Plus, telnet is useless for pipeing. ntcat pipes beautifully.

you can send / recieve to console, keyboard, files, or piped onto other programs.

Thanks for all the replies.

Yordan, what I want to accomplish here is to copy the ghost images on those CDs. I'm a "technician" and we have to reinstall the whole operating system sometimes. Since the ghost images will only restore properly to another machine with the same hardware specs (chipset, etc.), we need to create ghost images of many machines. For example, common machines that we reinstall Windows XP on are the Dell Optiplex: GX240, GX260, GX270 and GX280 series. So what we have here are ghost images for each and every one of those. Great, that's no problem. The problem is making copies for us. From what my co-worker told me (he's one of the guys burning these images from scratch on each machine), there's no way to copy the images. What I mean by this is that he got the image on CD already, but now he wants to make the process more easier by copying from the CD directly to another CD instead of going back to the Dell machine and getting it through Ghost again.

1. So I guess my question would be, is there any easy way to duplicate the CDs with the ghost images on them so everyone can have a copy for all those different Optiplex versions?

2. For Windows 98 (on older machines) does it really matter what machine I get the image created from? Meaning...will I be able to get it to work on other older machines without problems?

3. Is there any way to create a ghost image that will work on any machine (regardless of the hardware)?

I will see if I can get my grubby hands on the company's Ghost program to do this at the site next time I encounter another reinstall

...One last one before I forget. If they have the images on a external hard drive already, can I split it up using Ghost so I can fit them on one or more CDs? Or do I have to create one from scratch on that machine?

Thanks again. Saying this again....I really appreciate the help on this...this will help me out tremendously.

Im my limited experiance, windows XP can generally survive even the most insane hardware changes.

In desperation before i discovered rescue disks like knoppix, i often removed hard disks with working versions of windows on them, and put them on completely alien machines and sucessfully booted them.

So i dont see why your "ghost images" could not be used on differant machines.

The "Found New Hardware" Window goes insane, and you have to keep clicking "next" untill you have RSI (not literally)

but it works.

I wouldnt dare try somthing like this on a mission critical server, or a machine using a RAID array.

Haha.. that one was taught by this american kid - a very good friend of mine from my univ. days - a girl named Carrie. She'd always say - "That's Pimp" .. and I found it quite a new, cool and amusing way of complimenting.. lol..