Making an image of your hard disk using Norton Ghost

Norton Ghost is an exceptionally useful utility which allows you to create an "image" of your hard disk, which can be stored on a network server or cd-rom.

This "image" contains a full carbon copy of your entire hard disk, or selected partition so that if the unthinkable happens, and your pc dies through either terminal crash, or disk failure, you can dump your entire operating system back onto disk without the need for time consuming installation of OS, drivers and software.

This article is intended as a straightforward guide to using ghost, and while it may not cover every permutation of ghost's usage, it hopefully will give you some helpful guidelines as to it's operation.

Getting Started

Ghost is not a windows program, and can be used to image many different operating systems, such as Windows 98, 2000, XP and even Linux.

Because ghost is not designed to run under your normal operating system, you will need to boot your machine from an dos based floppy disk.  There are several steps involved in ensuring your machine boots from your floppy disk, rather than hard disk or cd rom.

1. Set your boot priority.

Your computer's BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) is a piece of "hard wired" software, which provides support for your computers peripherals, such as hard disks, cd-rom drives, and memory, and helps your OS to function correctly.  In order to access it, you will more than likely need to press either the <DEL> or <F2> keys during your machine's initial start up sequence.

It is often best to press this key (or combination of keys) while the computer is performing it's memory tests.

Once you have managed to correctly enter the computer's bios, you will be presented with several menu's covering everything from hard disk setup, through to power saving and processor configuration.

A word of warning!

Unless you absolutely know what you are doing, it is a good idea to avoid changing anything that you are not familiar with here.  The bios is a very powerful piece of software, and changing anything, no matter how inconsequential it may seem, can have far ranging effects on the operation of your machine, even going so far as preventing it from starting up at all.

Different brands of computer use different type of bios, for example Award BIOS, Ami Bios & Phoenix Bios.

Shown below is a screenshot taken from a Phoenix Bios:

As you can see, the present "boot priority" of this machine will cause the pc to attempt to boot from the cd-rom first, then the hard disk, and finally from removable drives, such as the floppy disk, or if installed a zip drive.

What you need to do here, is change that boot priority, so that the machine boots from the floppy disk before any other device.

Having successfully changed the boot priority, you should exit from your bios menu, ensuring that you save the changes you made.  You should be prompted to do so.

Here is an example of the boot priority settings from an AMI BIOS :

The "FT Ary 1" menu item that you can see in the above screen shot, simply describes the type of hard disk in this particular system (a raid array), but under normal use, you should see "hard disk", or "ide-0" as one of your choices.