Ghosting a Drive

[chris18]

I have Norton Ghost 9.

I have created several images over time a couple of which I've used to restore a drive when XP has been playing up.

I have now got myself a spare SATA and I'd like to Ghost my existing XP installation, also on SATA, so that if at anytime XP etc. plays up I can just switch the boot selection in BIOS and be up and running again in seconds. I am incidentally not using RAID.

As I said, I've used Ghost to create images but I've never tried to Ghost from one drive to another.

My reluctance to ghost drives stems from trying it some years ago with I think the Maxtor software and finding the target drive wasn't bootable when I needed to use it. Also, a friend has told me he tried it once with Ghost and not only didn't the target drive work but also his source drive got corrupted in the copying process.

Are there any issues, precautions etc. with Ghosting drives I need to be aware of before starting

Just out of interest does Ghost protect the source drive so it can't mistakenly be over written during the copying process?

I have done a search on the subject but haven't come up with anything that specifically covers the points I need to be clarified.

Thanks

[Snurfen]

With ghost 9 it's simply a case of taking the appropriate options throughout the wizard.

I've done disc to disc imagines and managed to boot from them many times.

[chris18]

Thanks.

Just went through the wizard and I'm not sure about the mbr option. I will be copying my working XP install, which is on a 160GB drive that has only one partition i.e Windows.

Similarly the destination drive is also 160GB and has only one partition on which an old corrupt version of XP is installed.

This drive was my old boot drive but as I say XP got corrupted so I have been using it as a temporary data drive. I have now cleared all the data files so want to end up with just a cloned, bootable XP install.

Do I select mbr or not?

[Snurfen]

Yes, it'll give you a clean bootable record.

[chris18]

Hi, thanks for the info.

I have tried a copy settings as follows:

Check source for system errors

Check destination for file system errors

Set drive active (for booting OS)

Copy MBR

Autoplay came up at the end and if I look at the destination drive it looks identical to the source drive (even the used and free space is the same) and I can browse the folders etc. I have even run a program from the destination drive and that worked OK.

However Ghost gave following message on completion

Description: Cannot complete copying of BACKUP_Windows XP (C:\) drive. Cannot copy source drive to destination location.
Error EA3905FB: Too few clusters.
Details: 0xEA3905FB

If I look in Events there was also an error stating (this was repeated a few times over several dates).

Description: Unable to successfully reconcile changes since last session.
Details: The data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available.

Don't know which drive this is referring to.

Is there any way of checking that the drive is bootable and has copied OK apart from switching over in BIOS?

I'm always a bit nervous of trying things out when I don't know for sure it's 100% OK in case I lose my working system. I'm even nervous about rebooting just in case my working OS has been affected by the copy process (does Ghost protect the integrity of the source drive?).

One other point I realised after I started the copy process that I hadn't disabled my broadband connection or closed down my firewall, antivirus and a couple of other things that get loaded at start up. I didn't want to cancel in case that caused a problem. For the future, should I have shut these down and will cancelling the copy process cause any problems?

Thanks

PS Phew, primary (source) XP boots OK so still working. Can put the whisky away now. Still to resolve whether the destination copy boots and works.

[Gauchoy2k]

Never really used Nortons Ghost but I have a question.
I just finished building a NEW PC with XP on it. Loaded all the SP & updates and all the software I want to roll with. The HD is a 120g, I have 20 older HD laying around collecting dust...so could I take one of them and ghost an image of this PC so if I ever run into a problem I can save time and restore it from this image?