I'm doing a relatively minor [but needed] upgrade by replacing my
c:\ drive with a new harddisk [SATA with 16MB cache]. I have some
time, as Im not in the middle of a session.
Does it back up everything including registry? I have two USB
drives, one for sessions and one for VSTi's, and I want to be sure
that I'll have the "same" computer I had before. I've done some
reading about Norton Ghost, but Im still left wondering if it will
suit my needs.
What are your experiences, preferences?
Thanks.

Ranpha,

Does it back up everything including registry?

Does WHAT back up everything?

I've done some reading about Norton Ghost

Yes, that's what I use and it's great. There are other such programs I
haven't used but that others tell me work well.

If you plan to make an image backup, which is the best insurance against
anything, you should have only Windows and programs on Drive C. Then your
backup will be reasonably small, and if you have to restore in six months
you won't overwrite any data. But beware that some data is on C: unless you
move it. For example, the Windows Address Book. You should also move your
temp Internet files off of C: to avoid backing those up which is a waste.

I wrote a 3-part series for Keyboard magazine a few years ago about all of
this. The first part especially will be useful for you. Find it he

www.ethanwiner.com/articles.html

--Ethan

"Ranpha" wrote in message
...

I'm doing a relatively minor [but needed] upgrade by replacing my
c:\ drive with a new harddisk [SATA with 16MB cache]. I have some
time, as Im not in the middle of a session.

Does it back up everything including registry?

IME Ghost image backups back up *everything* but empty space. The
compression works.

I have two USB
drives, one for sessions and one for VSTi's, and I want to be sure
that I'll have the "same" computer I had before.

Ghost can be a bit tough to get to work with some USB contexts. You may need
to add a cheap PCI USB card to some newer motherboards. IME some new
motherboard on-board USB ports just don't work with Ghost. The work-around
is simple - get a $20 (or less) PCI USB card that does work.

I mostly Ghost to IDE DVD burners or other IDE hard drives. PATA or SATA
doesn't matter - IME they both work with Ghost.

I've done some
reading about Norton Ghost, but I'm still left wondering if it will
suit my needs.

Hold that thought. ;-)

What are your experiences, preferences?

Ghost booted off a floppy or floppy image, recording to DVDs, is IME a very
practical solution.

I've round-tripped a number of bootable drives this way, and when restored
to another drive, that drive can boot like nothing happened.

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:48:01 GMT, Ranpha wrote:

I'm doing a relatively minor [but needed] upgrade by replacing my
c:\ drive with a new harddisk [SATA with 16MB cache]. I have some
time, as Im not in the middle of a session.
Does it back up everything including registry? I have two USB
drives, one for sessions and one for VSTi's, and I want to be sure
that I'll have the "same" computer I had before. I've done some
reading about Norton Ghost, but Im still left wondering if it will
suit my needs.

Ghost is the tool that does this job. Though you might consider
taking the opportunity for a brand-new clean Windows/programs
installation. Your old drive can stay in the box until you're sure
everything necessary has been saved.

"Laurence Payne" wrote ...
Ranpha wrote:
I'm doing a relatively minor [but needed] upgrade by replacing my
c:\ drive with a new harddisk [SATA with 16MB cache]. I have some
time, as Im not in the middle of a session.
Does it back up everything including registry? I have two USB
drives, one for sessions and one for VSTi's, and I want to be sure
that I'll have the "same" computer I had before. I've done some
reading about Norton Ghost, but Im still left wondering if it will
suit my needs.

Ghost is the tool that does this job. Though you might consider
taking the opportunity for a brand-new clean Windows/programs
installation. Your old drive can stay in the box until you're sure
everything necessary has been saved.

Excellent advice. Do take advantage of the situation
to clean up your computer. The behefits likely extend
beyond what you think they are.

"Richard Crowley" wrote in message
...
"Laurence Payne" wrote ...
Ranpha wrote:
I'm doing a relatively minor [but needed] upgrade by replacing my
c:\ drive with a new harddisk [SATA with 16MB cache]. I have some
time, as Im not in the middle of a session.
Does it back up everything including registry? I have two USB
drives, one for sessions and one for VSTi's, and I want to be sure
that I'll have the "same" computer I had before. I've done some
reading about Norton Ghost, but Im still left wondering if it will
suit my needs.

Ghost is the tool that does this job. Though you might consider
taking the opportunity for a brand-new clean Windows/programs
installation. Your old drive can stay in the box until you're sure
everything necessary has been saved.

Excellent advice. Do take advantage of the situation to clean up your
computer. The behefits likely extend
beyond what you think they are.

I'll second that. Make a Ghost image of your drive with the intention of
being able to restore from it if all else fails First, download your NIC
drivers to a thumb drive or CD-R so that you have connectivity for further
downloads. You may also want the INF (aka chipset) files from the
manufacturer as an integrated NIC may not work without them.

I strongly encourage a disk wipe to kill boot sector trash, e.g.,
http://www.killdisk.com/ , and a clean install. After
Windows installation make sure you get the INF files from the manufacturer
installed. An important step many aren't aware of.

Reinstall Ghost and retrieve what you want directly from the image (no need
to dump it to a partition). You can of course retrieve files from the old
disk, but sometimes you forget you need a file until long after the old disk
is reformatted as a second drive.

If this fails, write your ghost image to the new drive.

Ghost can also image the old drive to the new, but as Richard said, "The
benefits likely extend beyond what you think they are."

"Bill Quinn" wrote in message
news:BRRxf.349$SD3.58@trndny07...
I'll second that. Make a Ghost image of your drive with the intention of
being able to restore from it if all else fails First, download your NIC
drivers to a thumb drive or CD-R so that you have connectivity for further
downloads. You may also want the INF (aka chipset) files from the
manufacturer as an integrated NIC may not work without them.

I strongly encourage a disk wipe to kill boot sector trash, e.g.,
http://www.killdisk.com/ , and a clean install.

Scratch that, you said a new drive, sorry.

"Arny Krueger" wrote:

Ghost booted off a floppy or floppy image, recording to DVDs, is IME
a very practical solution.



Whereas Ghost on a laptop with no floppy drive was beyond this
particular knucklehead's ability to get working. I gave up.

--
"It CAN'T be too loud... some of the red lights aren't even on yet!"
- Lorin David Schultz
in the control room
making even bad news sound good

(Remove spamblock to reply)

"Lorin David Schultz" wrote in message
news:IlUxf.80281$AP5.25178@edtnps84...
"Arny Krueger" wrote:

Ghost booted off a floppy or floppy image, recording to DVDs, is IME
a very practical solution.

Whereas Ghost on a laptop with no floppy drive was beyond this particular
knucklehead's ability to get working. I gave up.

I usually boot Ghost off of a CDROM these days. Faster and more reliable.

Arny,

I usually boot Ghost off of a CDROM these days.

I keep Ghost in the root directory of C: on all my computers. Then I can
boot from a diskette (or CD or thumb drive or whatever) and it's already
there.

--Ethan

"Ethan Winer" ethanw at ethanwiner dot com wrote in message
...
Arny,

I usually boot Ghost off of a CDROM these days.

I keep Ghost in the root directory of C: on all my computers. Then I can
boot from a diskette (or CD or thumb drive or whatever) and it's already
there.

How does that work on NTFS partitions?

Arny,

How does that work on NTFS partitions?

I don't use NTFS. The one time I converted a drive to NTFS, just to try it,
I was dismayed to see that a large amount of the drive space was set aside
and unusable for data. So I switched back to FAT32 since I see no advantage
to NTFS for the stuff I do.

Also, I still use the old Norton Ghost that's a single 590 KB .exe file.
This old version works with NTFS sometimes but not others. I never tracked
down the reason, and I never got a new version because from what I saw it
was huge bloatware.

I'm all for progress, and I am NOT a Luddite. :-) But when something works
I stick with it until I have a compelling reason to move on.

--Ethan

Driveimage XML will work well with NTFS, and you can backup the drive
you've booted to in XP. Oh, and it's free.
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

Driveimage XML will work well with NTFS, and you can backup the drive
you've booted to in XP. Oh, and it's free.
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

"Arny Krueger" wrote ...
"Ethan Winer" wrote ...
I keep Ghost in the root directory of C: on all my computers. Then I
can
boot from a diskette (or CD or thumb drive or whatever) and it's
already
there.

How does that work on NTFS partitions?

Some of us have taken to leaving the C: boot/system/application
drive/partition formatted as FAT ...
1) to keep it availabile in case of emergency floppy boot
2) there appears to be no great advantage to NTFS on C:
3) when doing multiple-boot with other OS which do not
recognize NTFS.

"Richard Crowley" wrote in message
...
"Arny Krueger" wrote ...
"Ethan Winer" wrote ...

I keep Ghost in the root directory of C: on all my computers. Then I
can
boot from a diskette (or CD or thumb drive or whatever) and it's
already
there.

How does that work on NTFS partitions?

Some of us have taken to leaving the C: boot/system/application
drive/partition formatted as FAT ...

If it works for you, fine. But in 2006 the vast majority of PCs have one
partition and that partition is NTFS.

My plan is pretty simple - make a bootable CD or DVD that boots Ghost. It's
as close to a 100% solution for mainstream PCs as I can think of.

When I burn a backup a hard drive, I specify that the backup disc be made
bootable as well. So now you have this DVD that simply boots and makes your
PC all better, just like it was.

1) to keep it availabile in case of emergency floppy boot

NTFS is incredibly more robust than FAT32.

2) there appears to be no great advantage to NTFS on C:

Huh?

3) when doing multiple-boot with other OS which do not
recognize NTFS.

Did I say that in 2006 the vast majority of PCs have one partition and that
partition is NTFS. ;-)

One of the advantages of NTFS is that it allows you to control access to,
and execution of, files for each user. This is an important security feature
not available in FAT.

"Arny Krueger" wrote ...
Some of us have taken to leaving the C: boot/system/application
drive/partition formatted as FAT ...

If it works for you, fine. But in 2006 the vast majority of PCs have
one partition and that partition is NTFS.

Not sure what that means, but I don't count myself in the
"majority" anyway, so I'm not going to worry about it.

The C: drive is for boot, OS, swapfile, and application progs.
Everything else (i.e. data) belongs on other spindles.

My plan is pretty simple - make a bootable CD or DVD that boots Ghost.
It's as close to a 100% solution for mainstream PCs as I can think of.

I don't keep anything on my C: drive that can't be re-loaded
from the OS and application discs.


When I burn a backup a hard drive, I specify that the backup disc be
made bootable as well. So now you have this DVD that simply boots and
makes your PC all better, just like it was.

1) to keep it availabile in case of emergency floppy boot

NTFS is incredibly more robust than FAT32.

I've never had a problem with FAT32 over several
dozen computers. Can't remember when (or if?) I
ever had a C: drive failure.

2) there appears to be no great advantage to NTFS on C:

Huh?

OK. The advantage for boot/os/swap/progam files is what?
None of these files are particularly big except for the swap
file which has special OS protection regardless of format.

3) when doing multiple-boot with other OS which do not
recognize NTFS.

Did I say that in 2006 the vast majority of PCs have one partition and
that partition is NTFS. ;-)

Twice. And I didn't understand it even the 2nd time.

"Arny Krueger" wrote:

I usually boot Ghost off of a CDROM these days. Faster and more
reliable.



It's been a year or two since I tried it, but I wasn't able to find a
way to make it work on my laptop without a floppy drive. I seem to
recall that it wanted to write some kind of session-specific file to the
floppy that it would then use during the restore cycle.

Since my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive and no factory add-on is
available, I went out and bought a USB floppy drive (and could not
BELIEVE how much those things cost... are they still that expensive?
Anyway...). That didn't work either because the machine wouldn't
recognize the drive without Windows.

I'm again thinking about upgrading my laptop drive, so this could become
relevant in my world again real soon. How do you feel about getting it
working for me (for a fee, of course)?

What I want to do is dump the entire contents of my internal drive to a
new drive, so that I can pop out the old drive, pop in the new one and
start the computer like nothing ever changed.

The new drive gets dropped into an external USB case. That seemed to
work fine last time I tried. It was STUPIDLY slow because the computer
only has USB1.1 ports, but Ghost appeared to recognize the external
drive. I think... it's been a while...

I have a copy of Ghost that I purchased and downloaded from Symantec.
What do I need to do to make this work without a floppy?

Thanks!

--
"It CAN'T be too loud... some of the red lights aren't even on yet!"
- Lorin David Schultz
in the control room
making even bad news sound good

(Remove spamblock to reply)

"Lorin David Schultz" wrote in message
news:egLyf.116480$OU5.73278@clgrps13...
It's been a year or two since I tried it, but I wasn't able to find a way
to make it work on my laptop without a floppy drive. I seem to recall
that it wanted to write some kind of session-specific file to the floppy
that it would then use during the restore cycle.

Since my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive and no factory add-on is
available, I went out and bought a USB floppy drive (and could not BELIEVE
how much those things cost... are they still that expensive? Anyway...).
That didn't work either because the machine wouldn't recognize the drive
without Windows.

I'm again thinking about upgrading my laptop drive, so this could become
relevant in my world again real soon. How do you feel about getting it
working for me (for a fee, of course)?

What I want to do is dump the entire contents of my internal drive to a
new drive, so that I can pop out the old drive, pop in the new one and
start the computer like nothing ever changed.

The new drive gets dropped into an external USB case. That seemed to work
fine last time I tried. It was STUPIDLY slow because the computer only
has USB1.1 ports, but Ghost appeared to recognize the external drive. I
think... it's been a while...

I have a copy of Ghost that I purchased and downloaded from Symantec. What
do I need to do to make this work without a floppy?

I remove the HD from the notebook and connect it to a USB adapter,
specifically this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812156101 and ghost it
through my PC to a file on the PC's HD. Then I reverse the
process.connecting the new notebook HD to the device and ghosting back
(legally you'd need two copies of Ghost and that may not do, but I'll leave
that to the lawerly)

"Bill Quinn" wrote:

I remove the HD from the notebook and connect it to a USB adapter,
specifically this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812156101
and ghost it through my PC to a file on the PC's HD. Then I reverse
the process.connecting the new notebook HD to the device and ghosting
back (legally you'd need two copies of Ghost and that may not do,
but I'll leave that to the lawerly)



I've got a bigger problem than ethical issues... the laptop is now the
only computer in the house! When I discovered that there was a quarter
inch of dust on the desktop machine, I realized it was time to sell it.

--
"It CAN'T be too loud... some of the red lights aren't even on yet!"
- Lorin David Schultz
in the control room
making even bad news sound good

(Remove spamblock to reply)