Based on the recommendations of several people here, I picked up a
copy of Norton Ghost. Being the cheapskate that I am, I bought an OEM
copy of Ghost 2003 from Newegg for $15 rather than the latest retail
copy for $65 or so. I had two goals in mind. One was to clone the
drive in my laptop computer since I suspect that the origianal one may
be going bad. Second, was just to start being more diligent about
general backups.

Another weekend, another hamfest. I bought a USB-to-IDE cable gizmo
for $20. No perceivalbe brand name (hence no web site to go to for the
latest drivers if necessary), made in China. Came with a CD that
may be in Chinese (the documentation files, one as a .doc the other as
a .pdf, will open). Simple, kind of like the Weibetech Firewire lump
that Hank praises. I thought I'd give USB a try for the price. Plugged
a drive into it, plugged it into the USB port on my laptop, and voila!
I could access the drive just like a real one. A little slow since the
laptop has only a USB 1.1 port and this gadget is capable of
supporting USB 2.0, but it seemed to work fine. Tried it on the Win2K
computer (also USB 1.1 but I have a 2.0 card sitting here ready to
install) and that worked fine too. No installation necessary.

There's what seems to be a driver for Win98 on the CD. I instsalled
that on the studio computer, it said the driver was installed, but it
didn't work - the computer recognized that an unknown USB device was
connected and asked for a driver. Oh, well, no big deal. One of these
days that computer will be replaced anyway.

So, feeling confident that I had a usable external drive to which to
clone or back up to, I loaded Ghost up on the laptop (XP) and it
doesn't work. It starts to work - it finds the USB drive and I can set
it as a destination. It gets as far as writing the file name of the
Ghost image to the drive, but then quits and says it can't find the
destination drive. And, once Ghost has started, neither can I. If I
ran Ghost from Windows, I could get the drive back by unplugging the
USB cable and re-plugging it. If I ran Ghost from a Ghost-created DOS
boot floppy, I have to re-start Windows and re-plug the USB cable in
order to see the drive.

I haven't found anything useful on the Symantic knowledge base. I'm
waiting for an e-mail reply from Tech Support, but since there are
some Ghost users here, if anyone has experience with using it with an
external USB drive, tell me what makes it work if you have any more to
say than "it always worked for me."

Even if Ghost never works with this USB-IDE cable rig, I'll get my $20
out of it, and if Ghost never works for me at all, I've only lost $15,
but I've put my two hours into getting it to work and now it's time to
either get help or throw it away.



--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo