Hi, Basically I do not know much at all about ghosting PC's so I have a few questions regarding this. Firstly am I right in thinking if I ghost my machine, it means I will create basically a copy of my hard disk, which can be written to a CD, in the event of my hard disk dying, so I could replace the hard disk and put the image I created using ghost back onto it? I have also just remembered I may have a small spare hard disk (about 3GB)with windows 98 on. Would it be a good thing to leave the ghost image on this disk? If i were 2 install the second disk on my PC how would I go about doing it?. I mean would I need to set it as a slave, or could I somehow set it up to dual boot as startup? Thanks in advance to anyone with any help or ideas offered!! Paul

Hi, I am not a computer geek. I use Norton Ghost to ghost my hard drive to a 2nd hard drive. I believe your thinking is correct about ghosting. However, when I removed the hard drive from my old cpu and installed it as a slave in my new cpu, all XP disc management would allow me to do was to format it before it would assign a drive letter. Of course, I lost everything on that disc. Another thing - my gost image uses 11 GB of the slave drive. There are many questions on this forum about dual boot. Do a search and check them out. But,again, I think you may have to reformat your 3GB hard drive. Hopefully you will get more responses before you actually do anything. Good luck,

well its unlikely that youd be able to store your whole working drive onto a 3 gb drive. if you can great. you can put ghost on a floppy disk or on a bootable cdrom or boot from a floppy and run ghost from a cdrom. You dont want to ghost a drive while that drive is running windows. that simply is a bad idea. preferably what youd want to do is have two drives at near the same size. install the spare drive you want to ghost to. boot from a floppy or cdrom and ghost your working drive to the spare. either as an image or a direct copy. the image you can set ghost to compress so the spare drive could be smaller then the working drive. after ghosting unplug the the image drive and either leave it in the machine or take it out and put it someplace safe. This will increase the life span of your image drive by not having any power to it untill your ghosting. if you want to ghost your working drive so that you can burn it to a cd then set ghost to make an image and have it break the image into cd sized chunks. youll need space on the drive to make this work as ghost has no cd burning capability of its own to my knowledge. burn each chunk onto a cd. store the cds someplace safe.

Cheers that helps somewhat, I think I'll have a go at that! Hope you getting paid some big money in an IT job of sorts grem, I've seen stuff you've put on here before and you know your s--- Take it easy P

Ghost does support imaging to CD-RW from Ghost 2001 up.

I am not familiar with Ghost prior to Ghost 2003, which I am using. There is a difference in backing up and cloning drives, at least in 2003. You can back up to another hard drive, or to CD's; you then can restore your hard drive if it is damaged. But if you clone the drive, the drive to which you clone becomes a bootable drive and should be removed from the computer. So I think some of this discussion depends on the version of Ghost that is being used. Don't want to muddy the waters - - -

I still confuse about Norton ghost, because it work with different hardware. They could make any damages your harddrive. Do not make clone if you're using it for network connection.