Backup HD image to network

LoGiE

I've just finished wiping and reinstalling the OS on my laptop and was wondering whats the best program to make an image of this drive and store it on a desktop. Ideally I can then just refresh the laptop image over my LAN by sticking a floppy in the A: drive and clicking a few options:)

Cal

Jusy did an image of my clean OS a few mins ago. From what I saw during my brief run through the Ghost 2003 User Guide, I think that Ghost will handle peer to peer images.

Cal

Capt'n Midnight

And it should write to a Network drive - provided you have a boot disk that with network card drivers..

Basically if DOS can see it you can ghost to it - if you need windows to see it ppffffff....

Now if you choose the compression option and get rid of all the junk on your drive (pagefile.sys / temp files etc.) and you have a 2GB FAT 16 drive there is a resonable chance your image will fit on a CD - ie. ghost to HDD / Network - THEN back into windows or whatever and burn to the CD - this is a handy way of restoring (or you can restore across the network drive letter if you have that boot disk)

Other options - clean down drive - defrag - partition magic to free some space and create a new partition to ghost into...

Bottom line is unless the new version works in windows then you MUST see the backup / restore drive from a dos prompt .

Another option is to get a bootable linux cd eg: www.knoppix.net - this will have network drivers and partition copying tools somewhere on the most crammed 700MB CD ever..

deckie27

Norton Ghost is the answer
You don't have to be able to see the drive in dos, Ghost will see all drives ie Fat16-32, NTFS

Go with ghost

Dec

Capt'n Midnight

RE: You don't have to be able to see the drive in dos, Ghost will see all drives ie Fat16-32, NTFS

Reading is the easy bit (eg. NTFSDOS on http://www.sysinternals.com/) the problem is where to put the image..

One other way is to get a drive adaptor from 2.5" to 3.5" so you can put the notebook drive in the desktop for the cloning - but unless you are skilled in the art of repairing PCs' I would not recommend ever taking a screwdriver to a notebook....

LoGiE

So it seems ghost is the way to go:) Capt'n Midnight it's a thinkpad so it's easy to remove the HD but I don't think it will come to that.

deckie27

You say the notebook is on a lan
with ghost you create a boot disk which loads up the network card drivers logs you onto lan and maps a share eg on your desktop
Works a dream (If you have the correct network driver)

Dec

sirlinux

Also have a look at powerquest drive image pro, i prefer this, it's faster, especially across a network.

sci0x

Or PowerQuest Drive Image 7

retneil

if you dont have a drive to dump ghost onto try lookup dd.exe in google :

Its used in computer forensics but will do the job very nicely. Allows files to be copied from a partition across the network etc etc..

GUI

DriveImage 2003
is what we have been waiting for..