I tried to use Norton Ghost 2003 to backup a Windows XP machine before installing Linux on it just in case I wanted to go back. Well the backup didn't work and just hung, possibly die to the size of the hard drive. I am mow continually stuck rebooting from the ghost virtual partition. I found an old solution at https://forums.techguy.org/threads/... and my thought was to substitute a USB stick in place of the floppy, as the XP machine I am having problems with does not have a floppy drive.
Since Norton Ghost only writes to drives A or B, I was thinking I could reassign the letter of my USB port on the machine where I am going to make the bootable USB to A.
Assuming the instruction in the link work, does my idea of subsituting the floppy for a USB make sense, or is there a much easier way I can do this.
I was going to pick software as the problem but oddly backup/restore is not listed under that category.
There are usb floppy drives about... perhaps investigate one of those? Also see this MS article as it details how a usb floppy is assigned...
Yes I will have to do that because after the USB was created I could not copy the 3 files onto it because it said it was full. Is that because I bootable media is locked against write? I thought I had a an external USB. I will have a look around.
Backup files are usually quite large... These days there are large USB sticks/flash drives; and there is also a usb 500GB SSD which is no larger than a credit card. The latter being around £80 or so on Amazon (UK) and likely a similar price - possibly a little less - on the Amazon US site?
I found an interesting thing of why it didn't work My USB stick is 29GB but after using it to make it bootable from ghost the total size now shows as 1.38. That is eerily close to the size of a floppy.
What file format does it show? Also some usb sticks used to come with two partitions... If this is still so then possibly you have reformatted the (usually) smaller first one, and the rest of the stock is unformatted?
after I format it is 29GB. It s currently FAT32.
Not having used Ghost much in the past... and certainly not recently... I'm not really clued up on it. However I dun a wee duckduckgo trawl (around the bottom of the duck pond) and found these; which may be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yux...
http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_1b.htm
The youtube may be the more useful?
I really need to see if I can find an external floppy. I used rufus to create the usb stick and copy the files onto it but now I find the problem computer does not seem to have an option to boot from usb.
I booted the computer with a bootable XP PRO cd I have. After loading all the drivers I get to a screen where it lists the partitions on the machine. I see the following; I: Partition1 [NTFS] 30720 MB
C: Partition2 (-VPSGHBOOT-) [FAT] 10 MB
D: Partition3 (datadrive) [NTFS] 266781 MBI am assuming I, C, and D are the drive letters and Norton Ghost has remapped what was my C drive to I, and then made the virtual drive to C. If I delete the virtual partition at this point will it revert the I back to C, or leave as I.
Yes (14) | ![]() | |
No (14) | ![]() | |
I don't know (15) | ![]() |