Excellent, but overkill for harddrive upgrade
Written: Jul 14 '02 (Updated Jul 14 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Clean, efficient, effective
Cons: I only need 20% of the tool, and you might be the same
The Bottom Line: Norton Ghost 2002 is a good tool. It delivers its promises well. But I only needed 20% of the tool, but of course paid 100%.
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| kfgecko's Full Review: Symantec Norton Ghost Enterprise Edition 6.0 (Lice... |
I finally upgraded my 20GB hard disk drive to a 120GB version, but I was faced with the task of moving the WinXP operating system, as well as all the other data over to the new drive... and that's not as easy as Copy/Paste, unfortunately. Norton Ghost 2002 promised to do this painlessly for me, and it delivered. Problem is, this function should be included in WinXP. Because it's not, I was forced to buy something like Norton Ghost 2002, which was only 20% of it's functionality.
WHAT IS NORTON GHOST 2002?
Norton Ghost 2002 is compatible with Windows 95/98/NT and even XP. It makes moving or creating images of hard disks drives easy and allows you to do things like backup, relocated, restore, etc. You can do this via network, USB connection, images to CD-R, or just migration from one disk to the other. Unfortunately, I had no need for any of the above functions except the last: to migrate from one disk to the other... and I would probably never need Norton Ghost 2k2 again.
WHY DIDN'T YOU USE THE COPY METHOD TO MIGRATE YOUR HD UPGRADE?
I tried, believe me I tried. Because my new HD was 120GB, I formatted it with NTFS (NT filesystem, as opposed to FAT32) because this was supposedly necessary for drives larger than 40GB. After making a boot disk, setting my old drive as the IDE master drive C:, the new drive as the IDE slave drive D:; I rebooted with floppy. I checked the BIOS so that the boot would definitely detect both C: and D: drives, which it did. Then I attempted to COPY everything from the C: drive to the D:. Strange thing was, is that once booted with the floppy, WIN-DOS **STILL** could not copy several of the "locked" system files in the /WINDOWS folder, which meant I couldn't create an accurate copy. I tried things like hand duplicating the files, copying those, then renaming the duplicates on the new drive to the original name. But when it came time to booting from the new drive (new drive now as C:) the BIOS couldn't recognize the new drive as containing bootable OS.... Argh!
So I resorted to buying Ghost.
OK, SO HOW WELL DID IT WORK?
In a nutshell, Ghost was painless. It delivered everything I had purchased it for an made it painless. Ghost installed quickly on the old drive and I created a special Norton Ghost boot disk. It contains an interactive demo of what all the steps necessary for the entire process will be. This was very helpful and easy to follow.
The new drive needed to be empty, as the contents would be overwritten. Norton Ghost still requires that you have knowledge of how to install hard drives on the IDE port of the motherboard, and most often than not, expects you to jumper those drives correctly as master/slave. Once I did this, and both drives were recognized during boot, I could then boot from the special Norton Ghost floppy. The PC-DOS floppy booted and Ghost ran. I specified the "source" and "destination" disks, and it went off and copying the entire contents of my old to the new.
About 15 minutes later, Ghost was done and I could close the program. I then needed to reconnect the new drive now as the IDE master C:; and disconnect the old. My particular drive needs to be jumpered such that if it is by itself, the jumper is not set as master... which is a different experience from other drives. I suspect that the jumpering of your drive may require special attention, and this will require you go to the manufacturer's website to get specs or tech support... unless you are tech savy enough to do it yourself. Once this was done, I booted from my new drive and I was up a going as if I always had the new drive. I've been using my computer for several days now doing several things, and there are no problems.
One thing to note, was that the cloning was truly a clone. My old drive which had a FAT32 file system, meant that the new drive formatted to a 120GB FAT32 as well... which caught me by surprise since I was instructed elsewhere that I wouldn't be able to create > 40GB partitions with a FAT32. This meant that I later ran WinXP's convert utility which did the one way conversion from the FAT32 to NTFS. Now I'm wondering if I might have avoided some of the original copy/boot problems I had which lead me to desire Ghost. Could I have accomplished my goal without Ghost if I had kept the same file systems? I don't know... but for those of you out there in my situation... try SAME file systems and the copy method first.
WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER FUNCTIONS OF GHOST?
Sorry, I don't know. I didn't need these functions and so I never used them.
SO IS IT WORTH BUYING?
Well, Ghost is a well made product that delivers exactly what it promises; and it does it cleanly and efficiently. The big problem is that for a street price of $40, you're spending about 40% of the cost of your hard drive just to do a copy function that Windows should inherently have. The rest of Ghost's functionality isn't needed for a "hard disk upgrade migration" (which I suspect most people want it for). After it's done, you'll never need it again. I would suggest that Norton try and make a "Norton Ghost lite" version for like $10-15 which does ONLY the hard drive migration stuff... because that's all the value I was able to get out of it due to my small needs.
I feel like I had to buy the full 130 piece Craftman delux tool set even though I only needed the screw driver. Sure they're all good tools, but I only needed one of them; so I wish I didn't have to buy ALL of them just to get one.
BOTTOM LINE?
Norton Ghost 2002 is a good tool. It delivers what it promises, and delivers it well. But I only needed 20% of the tool, even though I had to pay for 100% of it.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
kfgecko
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Location: San Jose, California
Reviews written: 165
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About Me:
30-something male, born/raised in Northern-California.
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