How reliable is "ghosting" your c: drive

I'm contemplating buying a ghost image program, since a buddy told me it's pretty good.
I guess I think the best way is to format, or 0-write your drive, then format lol.
Then install everything.
Is ghosting very reliable?
It's something I'm considering but figured I would ask here first, for anyone who has done this.
Thanks.

 

You could try a free Ghost program before paying up http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm Might do what you want.

 

Cool thanks, but I'd still like to know if anyone has ghosted their drives and how it works(worked) out.
Thanks for the link.

 

Good idea in regards to backing up prior to updates.
So I'm assuming it's a good thing, this whole ghosting process.
I always worried about the registry not being completely right if you ever had to install and image and parts of the corrupt old registry lingering around.
So you never had any problems when installing an image back on your drive?

 

It completely overwrites all information on the drive.

 

I made full backup of my clean Windows after its installation and do incremental backup of the system almost every week. I prefer keeping archives on external hard disk drive. I use True Image as Halo. No problems were detected (I've been using it for about a year). By the way it has trial that allows backing up all you need and 30 days money back.

 

So would I be right in thinking that if you kept your "ghost image" fairly up to date that if the computer were to become infected/unstable, a simple reinstall of the image would make it right? A sort of more secure and reliable system restore? Do these programs run from DOS?

 

Fantastic!
Will have to look into this, will save a lot of hassle reloading drivers in the right order and setting up net security and connections again. Thanks Halo!

 

Ive been using Norton ghost for years. Works great. I Have two ghosts'
One after a fresh install and driver and window updates. Then another one with all my utilitys and stuff.

Just a side note. Every hard drive i own has a 20 gig partition on it. I use those for OSs. So ghost realy comes in handy.

Hope that helps

 

It does, thanks gamester.
So these ghosts, are they compressed in any way and safe from viral infections?

 

I only want to add that I usually verify image after its creating for more reliability. TI has this option. But all was fine all the times.

 

Ive never had a problem yet. Once however i installed Daemon Tools, was during when my system was going to s**t.

When I reghosted, it looked for daemon tools. Shouldnt have been there. Only happened once. But got me to wondering if ghost, Or ANY imageing soft is 100% real.

Then My have been a thing in the bios where you can enable or disable previous configs. or something like that. Shot in the dark.

Bottom line tho, Had no problems with the ghost.

 

Thanks for the info guys
Sorry bocaj for hijacking your thread

 

I'm having way too many corrupt image errors with Acronis.
As others are as well, on wilderssecurity.com (acronis' forum for their products).
Quite a few people having issues with their ghost images, all the same errors 0x70020.
Acronis apparently wasn't helpful in fixing the problem for people.
I'm looking at Norton now, waiting for my return from Acronis.
Halo, did you have any errors with AIT9.0?

 

This is back up for auction, so you can probably get it cheap even with the shipping. I use it also ( with Halo's help ) and very satisfied.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Acronis-TRUE-IM...ryZ51331QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Steve

 

Or you may write to Acronis support and ask them to send you TI8.0 ver. instead of TI9. Maybe it will work. Although personally I use 9 version and have had no problems yet...

 

Let's say you make an image of your hard drive and weeks later you want to install it. How exactly do you go about doing this? Do you just boot from the DVD? Is everything else on the drive wiped out before you do this (e.g. if you have 10 gigs full and your image is 4 gigs, will you still have crap left over on the drive?).

 

It will overwrite the whole drive. The first disc is bootable and you will be prompted to insert any additional discs when required, unless of course you only had a one disc backup. In your example, there would be nothing but the data that was in the image on the HD, there would be nothing left over from any previous installation. Your 10GB HD would have the 4GB of data only. You also have the option of installing only to a partition on that hard drive if the drive is already partitioned and many 'ghosting' utilities give the option of partitioning a drive when reinstalling. This would be useful if you were reinstalling the backup to a larger drive such as replacing your 10GB HD with a 100GB HD, which you might want to split up into smaller partitions.

 

How will a 4gig image over write a 10gig drive?
Will it just put 0's in place?

As for me, I ran the ghost, with TI9 and taking the chance (regardless the image was apparently corrupt on the 2nd test, first time image was fine).
The ghosting went well, however, I don't suggest TI9.
The fact that it says the image is corrupt one day, then works fine the next, makes me uneasy.
Thankfully my friend is lending me his copy of Norton Ghost for now, so I can just take a snapshot of my current setup, for peace of mind.
It's too bad, because I like the interface of it.
Acronis' support in my matter wasn't spectacular, neither was it helpful in the wilderssecurity forums.

 

When restoring TI allows you to choose whether to restore drive As is or to make proportional expanding of it according new disk size.

Well, it's very deplorable. And what TI build of 9 ver do you use? Actually TI9 had problems after release but most of them have been eliminated as I know. Maybe I'm lucky but I have had no problems with it yet.

 

Long time Ghost 2003 user here and it works a treat on my pc.

Besides having several images on another partition I also have a clone of C on a slave drive which I can boot into through bios.

I have heard that my version of ghost can have issues with the newer SATA drives.

 

I was also a norton ghost fan (and I still like Norton programs), but once I tried Acronis (after a lot of friends "forced" me to look into it) I understood their point.
Though they say ATI9 wasn't very successful I yet use and like it

 

Id have to check, since I'm not at home, but I've used it 3 times and all went well.
Plus I installed Norton Ghost (a backup for the backup, just in case lol).