I finally found a way of successfully burning a backup image of the primary partition to multiple CD's. 1. Even with version 7.5 the second partition has to be formatted as FAT in order to store the image file (symantec needs to get its act together with this - supposed to be fully compatible with XP). 2.Using ghost from a boot disk burn the full image to the second partition. (the ghost program gave incorrect drive letters by the way - it read d: as c: but it worked anyway) 3.After the image is made open ghost explorer from windows -choose options - set a span size to fit on a CD -I set it at 650 MB -then choose compile . 4. you have to give the spanned file a different name, and the process asks for confirmation each time the span limit is reached. 5. Then simply burned each of the 3 spans onto seperate CD's. 6.Using ghost boot disk again copy image from cd - choose the new spanned file name - and the program prompts for each CD. Note: I know it is supposed to do this - burn directly to CD's when the image is created but I couldn't get it to work - I suspect that it may be a compatibility issue with the particular model of burner. Also: Ghost 6 worked fine on Win98 but using it with XP images always resulted in a corrupt image. Sorry to be so long winded about this but I hope it may help someone else. Thanks also to those of you who offered advice on my previous post about this issue.

3 CD's?!? What the hell are you trying to burn?!? :)

What am I trying to burn? A backup image of the active partition. I left it uncompressed to play safe because I have had a lot of trouble using this version of the program. XP and the programs take up about 1600MB. Even compressed this would not fit onto a single CD. One of the issues I have been struggling with is to get ghost to span across multiple CD's - whether it is across 2 or 20 CD's is irrelevant. I don't know why this seems to amaze you

You will find it much easier to add this to your command line: ghostpe.exe -split=x where 'x' is the image size you want, for example: ghostpe.exe -split=200 this will split your image into 200Mb segments. Ghost 2002 does this automatically (span disks). Also note that there is a space between .exe and the '-' sign.

Thanks Xpose - I'll give that a try on the rest of the machines next week. I just had so much trouble getting this program to work I had to step through it the slow way. Regards

It's a pleasure... post back if you need more help with more commands. PS: This one may help with comression levels: -z or -zl (low compression or Fast) -z2 (high compression Medium) -z3 thru -z9 (higher compression Slower) Regards