Will ghosting a hard drive also keep the unused hard drive space on the particular drive at the time of ghosting or will it dump the unused space when the hard drive is formated and partitions are deleted? Thank you.

cloning overwrites everything according to the image used. There are two types of clones, drive and partition. Lets say you have c: and d:. You want to do a partition clone to c:. Your image has the be the same size as the existing c:. Now if you have a drive image it will overwrite everything on c: and d: according to the drive image. If the image is smaller you can expand it to use all the disk space on the drive. Hope this helps.

So since information that was deleted (not wiped) and is still present on the hard drive is in the unused space of the hard drive and would not be part of the clone or ghost image as the clone or ghost image takes up a certain amount of hard drive space and since that space is already occupied by the clone or ghost image data, any unused hard drive space that contains deleted (not wiped) material would be destroyed once the hard drive is formated again and the clone or ghost image is installed on the hard drive after overwriting Windows setup?

What are you trying to do?

Needed to delete (not wipe) a lot of information that was taking up a lot of room on a hard drive as wiping would have taken a very long time due to the amount of information involved, so its not really deleted and wanted to clone or ghost the hard drive Windows environment including other programs installed. What I am cloning or ghosting does not take up the entire hard drive and there is a lot of unused hard drive space which is where deleted (not wiped) items should be located. What I want to know is that the cloning or ghosting will only copy the part of the hard drive with the Windows environment including other programs installed and will not copy the unused hard drive space where deleted (not wiped) items should be located, so that when I am ready to format the hard drive which will destroy the deleted (not wiped) items and install the cloned or ghosted image, the previous unused disk space where deleted (not wiped) items should be located will be gone?

If files are deleted they are no longer of any concern as far as disk space is concerned. Clone, copy, or image, a disk and you'll get the current files. If they show in Win Explorer they'll show on your copy. You can't copy, or image something that's not there. Deleted files are not there!

Thats what I thought and just wanted to be sure, thank you.