lilfluff: On of my RP characters, a mouse who happens to be a student librarian. (Default)
lilfluff ([personal profile] lilfluff) wrote2006-09-12 01:10 am
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Anyone using Ghost?

Anyone using the current version of Ghost? I was surprised when I started seeing customer reviews with very unhappy comments, and then I discovered that it's no longer using the same engine underneath. It seems that Ghost 2003 was the last version of the old Ghost, symantic apparently bought out another company that had a drive imaging program and simply renamed the next version of that Ghost.

On the plus side the new Ghost appears to have good support for usb and firewire hard drives and burners.

On the down side it now runs from within windows, which means if you want to image the boot drive you are running from the same drive you are scanning. Which just doesn't sound to me like a recipe for good accurate images.

So is anyone on here using a current version of Ghost or have used it and have an opinion of whether it is still worth buying? Or would my money be better spend keeping my copy of Ghost 2000(2001?) and putting an internal DVD burner in this laptop instead?

Ghost came in quite handy on my old desktop machine, but the laptop has a 40 gig drive. That would be quite a stack of CD's. But I liked knowing that if something went crazy I could always just pop in the CD's and re-image the box. The laptop is, I believe, starting to be asking for a fresh install of windows. (And if I'm wiping the drive clean, I might as well partition it and put linux on too)
jecook: (Default)

[personal profile] jecook 2006-09-12 01:50 pm (UTC)(link)
I'll check what versions I have sitting on my admin toolkit CDs. At Company CA we have 8.2.
jecook: (Default)

A bit of history.

[personal profile] jecook 2006-09-12 01:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Ghost was orignally written by Binary Research, and later offered itself to Symantec in '98 (wiki).

In '03 they purchased Powerquest, which made a competeing disk imaging/editing program partition magic and DriveImage.

I imagine that parts of the DriveImage code are being ported to use the ghost UI.

Frankly, no tech should be without an older version of Ghost AND PartitionMagic. (and if they work on servers, ServerMagic as well) They are awesome programs which can make processes which are otherwise a hassle and very time consuming a lot easier.

jecook: (Default)

Oh, also:

[personal profile] jecook 2006-09-12 01:59 pm (UTC)(link)
On the BartPE CD, (one of my admin toolkits) the version of ghost for it will work with whatever disks that the XP image can see. USB drives (as long as they are plugged in and powered at boot time) work just fine. I'm not certain about Firewire drives, though...

AND burner support, with the appropriate plugins.

Re: Oh, also:

[identity profile] lilfluff.livejournal.com 2006-09-13 07:21 am (UTC)(link)
Oh yeah. I did catch a reference to BartPE the other day. That does look like a really nifty toolkit to have on hand.

The nifty thing was looking and seeing just how low laptop DVD burners have dropped. Not that long ago you would have been pressed to find a simple DVD rom drive for the same (I'm pretty sure the cd-burner/dvd-rom drive in my desktop machine cost more).

Which makes it even sadder that I really have to admit I shouldn't spend even that much right now on something I don't actually *need*.