Is it possible to use norton ghost to image a hard drive on a nt 4.0 serivce pack 4 laptop without doing any harm to the machine?I dont want to disturb the software on the laptop but I want to back.

Thank You

Yes it should work fine. I use PowerQuest's "Drive Image", but Ghost will do the same thing without effecting your programs.

May I ask why you don't install service pack 6a? There also is a pre-service pack 7 available from M$. There are major improvements in 6a.

The reason I dont install a later service pack is because I was told that the program I have on it ,that it will only run under service pack 4.What I might do is ghost it to my other laptop and try to install the newer service pack.Do you know if it will boot up with the ghost boot disk.I thought I read somewhere that you needed to do manually?

Thank You

Moin Tom,
I understand, you wanna clone a harddisk with the bootpartition from one machine to an other one. This will only work, if both laptops are absolutely identical hardware. Otherwise you will probably see a bluescreen and the system of your second laptop is gone, cause you overwrite the existing data, ghosting the disk. What do you mean with 'to do manually'? A bootdisk boots a machine, the ghost-bootdisk boots and loads ghost.exe, then you will have to tell the program, what you want it to do. You can clone over LPT: or USB, you can burne an image to CD(s) or you can clone from one disk to a second one in the same machine. First of all you will have to create a ghost-bootdisk which provides the drivers needed for you intentions (e.g. CD-writer, USB-port or so), you should read your manual before starting blind activities and destroying data unknowingly. Dick Johnson is right, cloning will not affect your SOURCE-disk, but the TARGET will be an image of the source after you're finished, the data it used to contain before, are definitely gone.
mfG, Carl.

What I meant by doing it manually was,that I thought nt 4.0 does not boot up with a dos disk maybe i am wrong.
I am going to be cloning to my other laptop which is the same model as my other one and I will also be saving the image of the other laptop also just in case.

Moin Tom,
as far the Norton ghost bootdisk is concerned, it works with NTFS, i.e. you can clone the disk. However, if your hd is NTFS formatted, you can't 'see' the data on it using DOS instructions like DIR or write onto it, having booted from a DOS-disk unless you install special ($$$$) tools. This is not necessary for your intentions and I would not recommend it.
mfG, Carl.