Ultimate Time Saver
Written: Dec 31 '00 (Updated Jan 01 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Saves TIME TIME TIME, and Your Sanity
Cons: Network Functionality, Has Trouble with Damaged Drives
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| Turin's Full Review: Symantec Norton Ghost Standard Edition 6.0 (Licens... |
Oh my god, I can't explain how much I love Ghost.
Home User:
For the most part, Ghost is a handy utility for even the home user. What it does is make a heavy compressed image of the hard drive. You can then restore them image later. If you have a second partition or second hard drive you can image your system drive on to it. Then say you try installing new hard drive, or upgrading your OS and your registry gets corrupted or wiped out, or you want to go back. You can then just restore your hard drive exactly the way it was.
It also works great if you are upgrading your hard drive cause maybe your old hard drive is just too small or starting to die. While I recommend at least once a year fresh installing win9x, this is an alternative that can save you hours of time. You can directly ghost from one disk to the other and you can then switch out your new disk for your old one and the entire disks content will the be the same on it.
Business User:
This is where I want to bronze my box and pay homage to it every day. I work for a school district and recently we purchased 1,000 new Acer computers* and Hp842c printers**. As we replaced every computer in every lab in our district, shuffled around our old computers, and distributed one new pc and two old ones in every classroom, this program shined through with a brilliance never before seen in another piece of software.
It literally took me 4-5 hours if not more installing the software on the 486's that we have to have in the district (we can't get rid of anything we can't remotely use). On a machine that old and slow it took about 30-45 minutes to ghost the machine onto a networked computer (hard drive on machine didn't have space). It takes about 15-20 minutes to then ghost any other identical machine in the district. Only 20 minutes, compared to the 5 hours it took me to do just one.
It saved us not quite as much time, but 15 minutes sure beats 2 hours on a pentium system. 9 minutes sure beats an hour-hour and a half on a p3 600 system. All that is left after ghosting is to change the network settings and the machine is good to go. This program was a godsend to us.
Other:
All of the images we made we designed to be less than 650meg so that we could fit it on a cd, which we burned along with the small ghost.exe program (500k about I believe). I recommend putting the ghost.exe on as the program requires you to boot of another device other than the one you are writing over as you can't read data off a drive that you are over-writing, so it makes sense. That means that most of your operations are going to require a boot disk. By putting the program on the cd, all you need is the cd and say a 98 boot disk, rather than the cd, bootdisk, and ghost disk. If you get real technically fancy, you can create a bootable cd, which I have looked into and found to be way too much work to be worth the effort. However, I do believe that some cd copying software have options to make cd's bootable built into them. It's easy enough for me to just keep a 98disk in my cd wallet with all my images though.
You can also ghost directly from hard drive to hard drive. An 8 gig hard drive, I believe they are 5400rpm western digitals, takes about 6 minutes on a p3 350. This was a big help to us as just recently mirrored all of our servers with WD 20gb drives. The great part about this was that we could just ghost the server's drive over to the new drive, and then mirror that drive. Then there was no hassle with changing the name of the computer or with setting up the network settings. We didn't have to worry about losing any associations or copying down the software, or with going through the hassle of setting the machine up as a BDC and then taking the server down and moving everything over, etc. It was just a simple process for us and the total server down time was between half an hour to an hour, which isn't bad at all. We then threw up the server running NT4 sp6 and started it mirroring, tested the software and locked it. That was the beauty of the software, the content of the new drive was the same as the old drive right down to the user database.
Cons:
I believe the version that we have is Ghost 5.1, but my cds are at work. The big problem that we ran into was that the network ghosting wouldn't work. I said before that I made an image to another computer and that worked. However there is an option to ghost a machine over the network, and that failed and crashed half way into it every time. I do not know if a newer version of the software fixes this problem.
Also, even after thorough scanning one of the servers to identify the bad sectors (3,300+ ouch) this version of ghost still wouldn't move the data over once it found a block. It warned us that it found a bad block and asked if we wanted to skip it and continue with the rest of the drive, and when we clicked yes it had an internal error and crashed. This may be resolved with newer versions of the software.
Tips:
You have to be careful to, because anything you do to the machine that you make the image off of happens to all of them after you ghost them.
Unlike what we did, which was rush all too often (hey we had A LOT to do), you should really take your time with your initial image. Fresh format and install your OS. Setup the hardware with the latest drivers. Install the printer and software you want to use.
*MAKE SURE EVERYTHING WORKS.*
I also recommend tweaking the heck out of your system before you do it. Set your IE settings if you are using IE or whatever browser you have. Once you set up IE, it will already be setup even if you change your network info later which you will have to do. Set your resolution to what you want and color depth. Set your swap size if you are controlling your swap file. Set your screensaver/power settings. There are a lot more, and I am probably missing a ton of good advice, but that's my point. Take your time, make a check list, pass it around to other people. Take an extra day if you have to just make sure you do it right the first time. Otherwise every pc you ghost afterwards, you will have to do it to each an every one of them. When there's a lot of them it will not only take you more time but frustrate and irritate you. I would also set the network settings even if they are going to be changed, but if you are designing the cd for a particular location, the DNS/Gateway/Wins shouldn't change for that location. I would even setup the IP if you have static ip's in your systems. You may have to change the end parts of it, but say if your address is 132.245.325.324 where 132.245. are static and 325.324 vary, then that's still two less things for you to enter on ever computer you are going to ghost. You can make the image as specific as you want right down to the workgroup if you want, or you can make as many images as you want for different setups.
One last thing I recommend doing is scandisking and then defragging your system just before you create the image. And remember if you want your image to fit on a cd, you can only a lot x amount of space for that. If you can fit the windows cab files on your image I also recommend that as well. If you copy the cabs files off of the windows cd and put them in a folder on your hard drive, every time your pc asks for say your win98 cd you can just point it to the drive on your computer and not have to worry about getting the cd. This is very convenient since the OS cd is probably the most requested cd your computer will ask for.
If you are interested:
*Here is a link to my opinion on the Acer machines that we purchased:
http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-2E78-315E33C5-39A9522D-prod5
**Here is a link to my opinion on the HP Deskjet842c printers that we purchased:
http://www.epinions.com/cmd-review-168B-31592FE4-39A94557-prod5
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Turin
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Reviews written: 77
Trusted by: 63 members
About Me:
23 year old Computer Technician/Network Admin into Games, Music, and of course Computers.
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