HELP! Ghosting / Imaging

[SnapperOne 0]

An IT guy we occassionally hire says, because of some suspicious hard drive sounds, we should "Ghost" one of our mission-critical business PCs. The repair vendor we use, however, says they don't (read won't) ghost a Win2k system, they image them. The sayd you can't ghost a Win2k system.

 

One - Is there a difference between ghosting and imaging?

 

Two - Could it be that our IT and repair vendor are using the term "ghost or ghosting" interchangeably with Norton's Ghost, and

 

Three - Can a Win2K system be "ghosted"?

[JP- 0]

Imaging and ghosting a drive are the exact same thing, its just that usually when you talk about using norton ghost you refer to it as 'ghosting'

 

So ghosting/imaging are the same thing essentially, and a win2k system can of course be ghosted, i am 100% sure about that part

[kgeissler 0]

I have a Win2k machine and have used Ghost successfully.

[Dirty Harry 0]

I'd guess "ghosting" refers to using Norton Ghost and "imageing" to using Powerquests Drive Image. Both do the same thing, they store a bit for bit copy of the HD or partition, only in different proprietary file formats. In a few minutes the whole thing can be restored, for instance to a new HD. Both work just fine on a W2K sys.

 

H.

[Igor 0]

As everyone said above those are the same things.

Symantec calls it ghosting

Powerquest calls it imaging.

Say thanks to the copyright law

 

>>The repair vendor we use..... If they don't know such a simple difference, maybe it is time to look for another vendor, ask you IT guy

[dcxman 0]

Imaging is the standard word in IT terminiology to describe a sector by sector copy of a HDD.

 

Ghosting came about from Symantec when they developed their Norton Ghost and Ghost Images hence "Ghosting"

 

Drive Image was developed by PowerQuest and is considered Drive Imaging when you use their software.

 

Now depending on the version you are using of Ghost or Drive Image you may or may not be able to image Win2K.

 

I know that Ghost 6.5 works and Drive Image 4 works as well. Ghost 6.5 has incorporated Image Spanning to accomodate Image sizes larger that the 2GB barrier. I believe Drive Image has done similar developments to their software.

 

Hope that helps

[AndyFair 0]

What I think your tech guy is trying to say is that you can't use Ghost on a Win2k system because Ghost can only write the image to FAT partitions, not NTFS partitions.

So if all of your partitions are NTFS, you won't be able to use Ghost (at least AFAIK) - but you should be able to use Drive Image because this can write to NTFS partitions (I think)

 

Hope this helps more!

 

AndyF

[ooops 0]

I "GHOST" my Win2000 Adv. Server with Norton Ghost 2002, no probs

[Ali 0]

i work for a computer company (MDG to be exact) and i like usin norton ghost 6.0 (for some technical stuff with the ghosting machine)

the only problem you may face with win 2k is when you use a NTFS partition. other than that you can ghost any FAT32 partition.