Ghost 10 sucks for drive cloning....

....in a consumer environment. The GUI is great, but unfortunately it doesn't
like producing a copied, bootable drive.

It's just me, isn't it.

Funny. DriveWizard works like a stinkin' charm.......

That is all.


Stew

 

FWIW, I've used Ghost starting back with version 5 or 6, all the way up to
and including 10.

Ghost used to be very easy to use, but somewhere around ver 2003 then 9 and
10, it lost it's ease of use for me.

I tried Acronis TrueImage when they came out with ver 8.0 and now that's
what I use for imaging as well as cloning. It just seems to be (at least to
me) as easy to use as Ghost used to be.

another benifit of TrueImage is you can download a 15-day trial version to
give you a chance to try it before deciding whether or not to buy it.

 

True Image 9.0 was released a while back, but was riddled with bugs.

The latest release (2337) has been out since 1/5/06, and is more like
what the initial release should have been.

For discussions about True Image, have a look at:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65

Notan

 

Stew,

Ghost 9 and 10 are very similar. See if this works.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1117581957;start=

 

Thanks, Brian. I don't know that I've ticked/enabled the exact combination
mentioned in the post, but I could try it.........though I'm not sure I want
to.

DriveWizard:

Drive Upgrade/ click C: as source, D: as destination / click upgrade / tick
"full upgrade".

Done. Repeatable, bootable clone.


I am familiar with the options listed for Ghost in that posting. Thanks for
the link.


Stew

 

Stew, I thought you wanted to clone an OS partition (Copy My Hard Drive).
This feature should only be used when upgrading to a new HD.

 

rubbish, isn't it. usual story of symantec buying out a perfectly good
product, and turning it into poo by shovelling in a load of features
that weren't required, and removing ones that were. grr.

 

Matching 80gb SATA drives, 2nd drive wiped and clean. Best I could do was
produce a disk that booted to the Windows 'welcome' screen and then hung,
all though all of the directories seem to be there when exploring from the
main boot drive.

Ghost wants to suggest that an application is accessing the drive on
occasion near the end of the copy; I disabled system restore on the slave
drive and verified no swap file on the drive.

Even on the attempts with no errors that appeared successful, still no joy.

As I said, same operation with DriveWizard produced a bootable disk in the
first attempt.

I've got to be able to have the end user perform this backup w/o confusion
and predictably and reliably.


Stew

 

Nail = Head.

All I want is a simple utility that can create an exact bootable
copy/clone - not an image. It's my opinion that it should not be this
convoluted. I ought to be able to manually create a bootable clone, the set
the schedule to repeat that operation as needed and have it be reliable.

shrug......

 

I'm not suggesting that Ghost 10 is your desired software but I am
interested in why it didn't work. Your example above suggests a MBR error.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm see Method #3

I haven't used DriveWizard but it does seem more suitable for your end user
if it works every time. Ghost 9/10 does work but you have to follow the
instructions exactly. If you try it again, I'd be interested in the results.

 

For sure that primary partition was set to Active?

 

Yep. Although according to the link Brian just posted, XP did recognize the
(2nd empty) partition and assign it a drive letter prior to the attempts -
an alleged 'no-no' according to the linked site.

The fewer conditions needed to allow the end user to successfully clone, the
better.

Further, in DriveWizard - if I choose to mirror-, it will invariably produce
a chkdsk on the subsequent reboot, correcting orphaned indexes and security
descriptors - and a non-bootable corrupted (sys32) drive.

However - in DW if I choose to "upgrade" the drive and select "full
upgrade", a perfect clone is produced with no chkdsk appearances or repairs.
This is the method I'll choose to go, only due to repeatability/reliability
and simplicity.

Many of these utilities are quirky, including DW. My brother attempted
using it (trial version of DW), and it simply wouldn't work on his machine.
He wound up using CasperXP.

Thanks for the input -


Stew

 

Be aware that you've got to be able to pull the drive out when it's
not getting mirrored. Booting with two (essentially identical) drives
in one machine will cause you all kinds of headaches, and is very very
difficult to unwind...

[Been there, done that, now I supply removable hard drive cages and
instructions. No problems with Ghost 8, but will probably never
upgrade...]

 

Therein lies the entire source of the rub. I've been able to get away with
this for some time on two of my machines for some 2 years without issue. In
fact it has saved my neck on a few occasions.

However, that's probably a large part of the problem that Ghost is having.


Stew

 

Stew, do you create "clones" (copied hard drives) rather than images? I
think one of the best features of Ghost 9/10 is the ability to create
incremental images which are small in size and enable numerous generations
of backups to be stored.

 

Brian -

I'm purely cloning, meaning (as you know), making a pure mirrored and
bootable backup. 1st drive dies, boot from the second with little or no
damage.

Ghost 10 also has incremental image backups it calls "restore points". I
can see where that would be handy in plenty of cases.

What I need is when a drive dies, either software or hardware, there needs
to be a bootable and very recent backup so that there's little or no down
time.

And...for that to be easily executed and reasonably understood by the
owner.(g) I thought of RAID1 but later dismissed it as more than needed.


Stew

 

Are you really sure it's working like you think it is? Try pulling
the clone and booting from a single drive...

It's not a Ghost problem, it's a WinDoze problem. Both drives say
"I'm the one true system drive, boot from me!" and you get all kinds
of ugly stuff. At least one system would boot from the cloned drive
(P: or whatever), but still look for it's programs and such on C:, the
original system drive. Installing programs would cause registry
entries to be written to P: while program files would be written to C:
and bizarre stuff like that. Then it won't work right from either
drive...

Why not a RAID mirror? That's the easiest way of ensuring you always
have a backup drive, and swapping one of the drives (if done right)
will allow you to make a bootable offsite backup.

 

Stew, this makes interesting reading. Clone vs image.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1132968474;start=#7

 

William,

While I acknowledge such thorny issues could be created cross-drives, as
long as the user continues to install and maintain the C:\ drive, the risk
is minimal. All of those changes will ultimately be copied to the D:\ drive.

While I'm quite convinced that quirks can happen if you have (2) active
primary partitions (with their own respective mbr) running/connected
simultaneously, it shouldn't matter if BIOS determines that IDE or SATA 0 is
first in the boot order, and IDE/SATA 1 comes afterward, or even after the
atapi/opticals.

The damned thing's gonna grab the first boot record on the first drive it
checks. There are a lot of things in life I do not know, but this one I'm
pretty sure of.

And with regard to Brian's comment, yes - both drives boot independently and
properly if the other is removed/disconnected. I wasn't intentionally
attempting to stir schitt here, but merely reporting what results I had
seen.

Right now (and in my Dim8300, for example using IDE drives), I have two
identical, bootable SATA drives that co-exist and can both be run
independently if the other is removed.

(shrug)


Stew

 

the final straw for me was sitting in a hospital in sweden, with
approximately 4 hours before my flight left, and a load of recalcitrant
desktops to image. using a selection of versions of ghost (and
eventually resorting to a colleague buying the latest version over the
web on his personal credit card) we watched in despair as it fell over
in new and interesting ways.
i was using an hp desktop as a cloning station, and cloning various
disks A to B on it: some to end up on IBM thinkcenters, some on HPs.
in all cases i was using the appropriate fully working source hard disk
(with either HP or IBM image on it) for that type of destination
machine - end result: the clone was only bootable when cloned using the
same hardware as it was going to end up using - i.e. the "clone" ghost
produced was in some way different depending on the hardware used to
produce it.
this makes no sense whatsoever, and made a significant contribution to
the number of grey hairs i developed during that rollout....