Read if want to keep a fresh system install

daveg

I used to rebuild my machine on a 2/3 month basis to remove all the clutter on my PC and also to speed up my machine. however it takes a few (boring) hours to rebuild a machine so I came up with this simple setup that ensures a clean operating system install within a few mins.

Let's say you have your C: drive which contains your operating system. Rebuild your machine to the stage where you have all drivers installed and everything is at the point where you would start installing games ect.

Take an image of your c drive using norton ghost. The best way to do this is to a CDRW. This way if you decide you want to add another driver/application ect to your fresh install you can do the following:

1. restore your ghost image

2. install driver/application

3. Overwrite the ghost image on the CDRW with the new image.

I apologise for making this sound a hell of a lot more complicated than it is. I use this setup to remove all the clutter I accumulate from installing games/applications/web ect.

irishgeo

I have Norton Ghost but cant get the bloddy thing to work. How do it get it to work. Does it load from DOS or what. I have Windows XP and Norton Ghost.

Please help.

daveg

Follow the steps below...

1. Make a ghost boot disc (CDrom support)
(3 diff types - Cdrom support to make a CDr ghost image/LTP for parallel ghost image copy (between 2 machines)/TCPip for ghosting over network)
2. Boot with disc in
3. When you get to the dos type cd ghost (go into ghost directory)

4. type ghostpe
5. You will now be in the ghost program.

Select partition - to image
Select what partition you want to backup (c drive)
select where you want to send the image to. I suggest to a CDRW but you can send image to a diff partition if you prefer.

Ghost will then backup your C drive to a single image file. It will only backup the amount of data on C: drive (for win98/all drivers/office approx 500GB)

If this doesnt make sense/or if any steps are wrong let me know. I'm not at my pc at the moment (at work) so I'll run through the steps at home.

GUI

COMON!
Imaging has been around for years..

best method for residental users is this..

Make image using powerquest driveimage 4.0
it allows u to specify the size of the file splits
i.e 7x 700meg images

so u can restore the image from cd-r :-)

Boot off floppy and pop in cd after cd when ur prompted!

i restore from cd-rw

usually make new image every 3 months!

daveg

Make image using powerquest driveimage 4.0
it allows u to specify the size of the file splits
i.e 7x 700meg images so u can restore the image from cd-r :-)
Boot off floppy and pop in cd after cd when ur prompted!
i restore from cd-rw

and the difference between that and what I said is what ? :rolleyes:

You can backup an image to CDr/CDRW with ghost too.
If the image is bigger than 700MB ghost will prompt you to insert another CDr.

rymus

ladies... please! Lets not fight. Both of your solutions are perfectly good

(i'd go on the side of ghost tho... its the shiznats - even though I'm probably biased cos I'm a network admin & ghost has saved my skin a few too many times)

irishgeo

Thanks for the help guys. I be heading home tonight and i post tomorrow on how i got on.

Its fairly easy to do by the looks of things.

strat

if only life were so simple

this method dosent work for me on windows xp - see previous posts of mine on the MS apps/Os if you want to know the details

I have to mess round with sysprep.exe (so im told) to make the xp partition ghostable without having to 'repair' xp every time :rolleyes:

hours of fun

Cake Fiend

Strat, give PowerQuest Drive Image a go - I use Drive Image 2002 on XP and it works fine for me, no need for messing about afterward.

GUI

ya as i said driveimage is the way to go

phaxx

(Making the expected beardy unix freak addition)

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Ghost for Unix. Based on NetBSD, small images for a bootable cd (and floppy, but no sane person uses those anymore)
Backs entire disk up to an FTP server (gzip compressed)

I realise this isn't very useful for the majority of people without a LAN and a server providing FTP and so on, but I find it excellent, and far better than trying to create a bootable ms dos floppy with network support just so one can use norton ghost, and then have to feck about with shares and so on.

Mixie

Strat - Ghost works fine for me on Win XP?

air

First of all, ghost is the business.
Its not very intuitive & requires a bit of creativity from the user to get the most out of it but it has a myriad of uses.

Re ghosting accross the network - I put together a boot disk in my last job so that lads could back up their laptops to a server (laptops had specific software installed that required looong config).
I set it up so that all they had to do was stick in the floppy, connect machine to the network & reboot. The disk booted the machine, mapped the drive & did everything else necessary to ghost the machines. All they had to do was click ok.

Bottom Line, ghost might look simplistic but it has lots of command line switches etc & u can do great things with it if you're willing to explore its features.

PS I can email anyone an image of the network boot disk if they want it.