NortonGhost9 vs. NortonGhost 2003

For a long years I have been using PowerQuest Drive Image and it worked perfect all the times. Recently I switched from Win2000 to WinXP, and here the problems came.
Every time I create an image with DriveImage, the size of the file is 0 kB. After many attemts I managed somehow to create the image, but when I tried to put it on the system to see if it works and..... BANG. - The restore process crashed and the partition was deleted. So I had wasted two days of installing and configuring my system.

Anyway I decided to move to Norton Ghost. but I found two versions - Ghiost 2003 and Ghost 9. Can anybody tell me which one is better and is there any major difference or just one is older than the other. What I am interested as well is:

1. Can I create a bootable media?
2. Is it neccessary to install it in order to create/restore the image?
3. How reliable it is?
4. Does it support SCSI and SerialATA controllers in RAID 0, 1?
5. Can I use it on a different platform than Windows?

Thanks in advance,
Pimmy

 

As I understand it, Ghost 9 is basically IDENTICAL to DI7. Symantec bought out Powerquest this past year which meant that they now had TWO imaging programs. It appears that they have decided only to sell the DI7 but have renamed it Ghost 9. In doing so, at least at this point, they are dropping the original Ghost. So if you purchase Ghost 9 you will still be using DriveImage, just repackaged and renamed. Does anyone have any more updated information on this?

Acadia

 

I did install it already (Ghost 9, it has an evaluation period) but to me it doesn't look like DI (6 is the leatest I 've used, probably 7 is different). Also I couldn't find anywhere the utility to create startup disks.

Cheers,
Pimmy

 

I don't have alot of experience in this area, but one of the differences is in the O/S each supports.

Norton Ghost 9.0
Windows® XP Home, XP Pro, 2000 Pro SP2 or later

Norton Ghost 2003
Windows XP Home, XP Pro, 2000 Pro, NT WS with SP6 or later, Me, 98

RobZee

 

Supposingly I am going to use it only on Windows XP when I am creating the image, does it matter on which machine I am going to put the image. I.e. will the NortonGhost create a bootable image, or I will need to have the Norton Ghost installed on a machine in order to put the image onto it?

Cheers,
Pimmy

 

More Help info from Symantec - I don't know if it's applicable to your situation, but here it is -

Key Features
NEW! “Hot imaging” lets you create backup images without restarting Windows®. *
Backs up everything on a hard drive or partition.
Works with a wide range of hard drives and removable media, including CDR/RW and DVD+-R/RW drives, USB and FireWire® (IEEE 1394) devices, and Iomega® Zip® and Jaz® drives.
Restores data from images created with PowerQuest™ Drive Image™ 7.0 and previous versions of Norton Ghost.*
Symantec Recovery Disk lets you restore data from a backup image even when the computer can’t start up into Windows.
Norton Ghost 2003 is included to back up and restore data to: Windows 9x, Me, NT; Linux®; and DOS systems.

*This feature is not available with Norton Ghost 2003.


You can copy the contents of one hard drive to another. You can copy your operating system, applications, and data to a new hard drive. If the hard drive you are copying contains more than one partition, you must copy the partitions one at a time to the new hard drive.
You can use the Copy Drives feature when you upgrade to a larger hard drive or when you add a second hard drive and keep the original. You should not use the Copy Drives feature to set up a hard drive that will be used in another computer.

 

Hi Pimmy,

You should check out all the Ghost 9 threads in this forum (there are some posts in the Acronis forum too).
I have Ghost2003 and it works just fine (different combinations of RAID 0, 1, SATA, PATA). But whether Ghost2003 or Ghost 9 works correctly on YOUR system is another thing. It is hardware dependent.
The important thing is to test it out completely a full backup and restore on your computer. That is the only way to tell if it will work when you really need it.

 

Thanks Guys for the help,

I will give it a try anyway tomorrow. However I am a bit sceptic how the image is created without actually exiting the system. If during the image creation I do copy/delete/modify files... which will be the back-up point? Also I couldnt find in Ghost 9 how can I create a restore disk with which I can boot the system.

Thanks,
Pimmy

 

Hi Pimmy,

Yes, I agree with you that it is very difficult to create a consistent image of a disk drive without locking all objects that can be changed during a course of time. The image must be both physically and logically consistent. For example, what guarantees that the system is in a logical state of consistency at the point of time the imaging begins (e.g. the registry is logically consistent) unless all persistent objects are locked and the system overall is quiesced.

For this reason, I have been evaluating the Bootitng products. For my purposes the Image for DOS seems to be adequate - and most of all reliable. An image that is not 100% is useless in my opinion. Bootitng provides a special program that is suppose to lock the XP object so that a consistent image can be created, but I am not sure whether it is sufficient to guarantee a logically consistent image. Maybe others can speak to this point.

Rich

 

Richrf,

Do you have any idea how long (in minutes) it would take to image a hard drive with 10GB of data on it with Bootitng? And then restore the image? Thanks.

 

Bootit runs OUTSIDE of windows. Therefore, all partitions in your HD will not change during image creation. In other words, Bootit will always be able to achieve a STABLE LOCK on any partitions in your PC.

The imaging speed depends on individual PC. 150MB/min for an old 266MHz unit to +2000MB/min for a high end computer. You should expect to see at least 1000MB/min if you have a new PC. Restoration speed is about 50 to 70% faster.

Bootit also comes with a HD partitioning software. I would recommend that you create an extended logical partition to store the pagefile. This will reduce the time it takes to image your windows partition.

 

Hi JimmyPage,

I created an image copy, under DOS, of a 3 gig partition on a external USB 2.0 drive. I didn't time it precisely, but I would estimate it was about 15 minutes. This didn't bother me, since what I was looking for was a one-time, precise and logically consistent image copy that I could restore to whenever I was hit by by a virus/trojan or when things crashed. Henceforth, I will be doing regular data backups of my important directories. For me, this should be sufficient since my installed software is pretty stable.

Hope this helps.

Rich