Making an image of your hard disk using Norton Ghost - Page 2

2. Booting From floppy disk.

Now that you have set your computer to boot from the floppy disk drive first, you need to have a suitable disk prepared.

Those of you using Windows 98, or Windows ME can create a suitable boot disk simply by formatting a floppy disk through Windows Explorer, remembering to check the "Copy system files" box before you start.

Another good way of creating a boot floppy is downloading a self executing boot disk writer such as this.

If you have created a full boot floppy (such as a windows 98 startup disk), you will probably need to have a second blank disk handy for the ghost program to run from.  If you can, copy a mouse driver to this floppy disk as well, so that navigation through ghost's menu is made easier. The latest version of the Microsoft DOS mouse driver is available in winzip format from here.

To start ghost, simply eject the boot floppy, insert the disk you copied ghost.exe and your mouse driver to, and type :

mouse , followed by ghost

In the above screenshot, i have changed to drive R: in order to load ghost off a utilities cd-rom which i use.  If you have copied ghost onto a floppy, you should stay on drive A: and start ghost from there.

3. Making your image.

Once ghost has loaded, you will be presented with a screen like this :

Depending on how you wish to store your ghost image, you may wish to use the options to specify media size (eg cd-rom = 650 or 700mb).  Another way of performing this action is to start ghost using command line switches.

Shown below is an example intended to split the ghost image into 640mb chunks, suitable for cd-rom storage :

Important considerations.

In order to make a ghost image of your hard disk, you will need space on a separate hard drive or partition, equal to the size of the space currently taken up by your operating system and software. Even if you intend to archive the ghost image to cd-rom, you will temporarily need hard disk space to write the image.

Because you must boot from an ms-dos boot disk, which does not understand NTFS partitions, the separate drive or partition  which you are going to use must be formatted using the FAT32 file system.

If you are using Windows NT4, 2000 or XP, and you have formatted your C: drive as NTFS, then you will not be able to directly see that partition through ms-dos, although ghost will be able to work with the partition just fine.

Due to this limitation in ms-dos, when you go to save your image file, the partition or drive  which is normally your D: drive, may appear as C: in ghost.  Do not worry about this, as when you reboot to your OS, it will return to D:

This limitation in ms-dos does not cause a problem if all your drives are formatted as FAT32, as they would be if you use Windows 98 or ME.

If you are happy that such a drive or partition exists, and that you have adequate free space, then you can start telling ghost what to make an image of.

We start the imaging process by clicking on the following menu items in sequence :

Local => Partition (or Disk) => To Image.

• You would use "Disk => To Image" if you wished to image an entire drive, or a drive which only contained one partition.

• You would use "Partition => To Image" if you wished to image only one of the partitions on a hard disk, i.e if you had used FDISK or Partition Magic to physically split your hard disk into two separate drives .. for example C: & D:

From the above screenshot, you can see that we are selecting the primary (and only) partition on this hard disk.  You may notice that because the drive is formatted using NTFS, there is no reference to a drive letter.  If your source partition is formatted using FAT32, then the drive letter will be visible here.

Once you have selected the drive or partition which you wish to image, ghost will ask you where you wish to create the image.

As you can see from the above screenshot, we are going to save the ghost image on our C: drive, which in actuality, is the D: drive, but since ms-dos cannot "see" our real C: drive because it is NTFS, it substitutes the second drive or partition to the C: drive letter because it is the only available or useable hard disk or partition.  Again, i have to stress that this issue is only prevalent for those using a Windows NT / 2000 / XP system running NTFS.