Norton Ghost etc.

[harlequin2k5]

do I understand how this software works? when it's used you can make a complete cd image of your hard drive and then use the cd in another computer and have the exact same settings and software etc.?

I may need to switch out one of our computers here and I'm hoping that I'm understanding the use of ghost or any other utility like it because there are a couple of applications that are home made that I'm unable to repackage and reinstall and we can't afford to lose the data that's in it (I know there are other ways of getting the data with importing etc - I just don't want to lose any of it at all)

any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated

[JamieR]

Yeah, well you use Norton Ghost to create a clone of a hard disk which can then be cloned onto other disks etc. There's several different ways how you can backup a disk/partition with Ghost - do a disk to disk ghost (so basically clone say disk 0 to disk 1 - disk 1 will have exactly the same partition as disk 0) or backup to a *.gho image file either on a cd or a hard disk etc to name two. I'd do a disk to disk backup personally rather than backing up to a cd because you can just boot from a ghost boot floppy and then clone the disk back to the other disk. I wouldn't use cds because you'll have one ghost image split over loads of cds which could get messy, depending on the size of the hard disk.
Most of what I do with ghost nowdays (like at school and places) involves Ghost Server and multicasting however.

[harlequin2k5]

would I be able to ghost the drive to the server and then move it to the new drive from there?

[oracleguy]

I haven't used the personal edition of ghost (which is most commonly found in stores) for a little while but I know you can save the hard drive to an image file. I'm not sure if it will let you do that over the network though to a remote location. At worse if you had an extra hard drive to put in there you can save the image to that (and that would be the image file so it wouldn't overwrite any other data on there). I'd probably be best just to clone the old drive to the new drive in the new computer.

Word of warning though Windows is going to be upset if you clone it onto a computer with different hardware than the old one. Small changes like video card, sound, etc. aren't that bad but I'm not sure if they removed the security feature from XP that will cause it not to boot if you change the hard drive controller on it.

[harlequin2k5]

maybe I'll just do it the old fashioned way and just add the old hard drive to the new pc

I'm just happy I was finally able to block it from internet use *chuckles*