I was just wondering about Norton Ghost. If I wanted to clone my 30 gig Harddrive with Norton ghost, and the drive was pretty much full, how many discs would I have to use? I started to use it but when I noticed that after burning 1 disc it was only at 5% finished. Is it gonna take 20 or more discs?

Matti can you help with this one? :-) (XP is what your make it!)

That's just the way it is. Even with compression, ghost can't fit much more than one gig on a cd. The good news is that cd's are cheap. The best way to use Ghost is to have the operating system installed on its own partition so you don't have to ghost the entire hard drive at once. If the way your computer is set up right now is important to you, then burning $10 worth of cds for backup isn't really a bad investment.

You say cloning but in fact I think you mean imaging. Ger is pretty well right although I've always found Ghost compresses to about 60%and a CD will hold approx. 1.4Gb. Make sure you do a defrag first. If your drive is one big 30Gb partition think seriously about partitoning it. Presumably you want to backup for disaster recovery so ask yourself "do I REALLY need all that 30Gb worth of stuff" ? If you've got games installed, which can consume vast amounts of space uninstall them, you can always reinstall them later. Got loads of MP3's ? Burn them to CD and get them off the HD too. Empty all your Temp folders. There's lots of things you can do to claw back some of that space and save on the number of CD's (and the time to burn them).

There are also command line switches that you can use to make Ghost disregard certain files and this will reduce the amount of space. For example: ghostpe.exe -skip=\progra~1\ This will allow Ghost to image your drive but it will leave out the entire Program Files folder... and that WILL save space. If you would like to pursue this line you can e-mail me but be sure to leave "nospam" out of the address.

You can disable Hibernate and Page File and you will save 1.29 GB of disk spase.

NE1 have a program that will clone DYNAMIC drives under Win XP Pro? Ghost 2002 will not do it, only basic drives.