I have a 40 GB Drive with 2 NTFS partitons C: and D: I want to back up partition C: which contains my Terminal Server setup. When I use a Norton Ghost Boot Disk, it lets me select the source partition C: but when I want to choose the destination drive, the only option it presents is A: NOT D:!!!! Why can't I select the D: drive as a destination for the image? Is it because the bootup floppy that Norton Ghost (or even WIn98 boot floppy)uses is FAT and therefore cannot allow GHOST to see the partitons correctly? I am stumped.

In a nutshell - yes - although I've heard Ghost 2003 can handle NTFS.

Moin, I work with Norton ghost 2001. Since I have only been creating complete harddisk clones of my system-disk, I tried it out now with an image, to reproduce your problem. This is what I found out: You can write images to CD-RW, MO-drives (if drivers are loaded) and even to drive A:, but no NTFS formatted drives are shown as destination drive. So it seems to be the issue, that a NTFS-drive or partition cannot be read/written from DOS, though the program can clone complete NTFS-harddisks, because for a clone there's no need to write into the filesystem and change the MFT, it can be copied without understanding it, as far I understand the problem. Unfortunately I don't have informations about the most recent version of Norton ghost. I'm just curious to know: why don't you write the image to a CD or create a complete harddisk clone? This method would provide much more data security (if your disk smokes off, your image is gone as well, since it is on the same physical drive!) and a disk clone is available within a minute or two (just change the IDE-connection and m/s-jumpers). mfG, Carl.

Good point. We are doing that for the moment, but a disk clone limits us to one image that is ready to go. I porefer to save to a .gho file so we can make several images, compress thewm too if needed. One image can be clean install, one can be after all apps are loded, one can be a backup to be made once a week ...that way one physical disk can hold the OS on C: and many backups on D: That's what I wish to accomplish. Very practical.

What if C: is partitioned as NTFS but the D: partition is made as FAT32 so it can be accessed and therefore can store multiple image files from C:? Can this be done?

Moin, thanks for the feedback, very interesting method of saving several important system states, I'll take over some of it! Now to your question: Running WinNT I'd never like a FAT32 partition, it's inaccessible from NT and the IBM-DOS shipped with ghost will probably have some trouble with it too, you could just try to create a Win98SE bootdisk, copy the Norton-files on it and figure out, if it works. Well, for my personal taste it sounds too complicated, I wanna have clear conditions, things in my computer have to work without sophisticated workarounds, cause in case of some little unexpected event you will have to spend lots of time to knock things in shape again. I don't think, that's what an admin really needs :-). If the DOS-NTFS issue mentioned in my first posting is the reason for ghost not to provide the NTFS-partition as destination, it should work with a FAT16 partition. But, to be honest, I'm not absolutely sure, you'll have to try it out. Good luck, I hope it helps and lemme know, if it doesn't take too much of your time. mfG, Carl.

There's something else I wanna mention, thoug you probably know about it: WinNT boot/system partitions must not be larger than 7.8 GB, cause if some bootfiles (ntldr, boot.ini, Ntdetect.com) come out of this range, the system cannot boot anymore. This might happen by defragmenting the disk/partition. My suggestion for the partition sizes of your disk would be: C: 4GB NTFS (this size can be created without the atapi driver of SP4) with only the system and apps being not allowed to install in a different path, D: for apps and the files (NTFS formatted) and E: FAT16 for the images, the sizes of D: and E: depend on your needs. mfG, Carl.