TrueImage 8 vs. Ghost 9?

Anybody have opinions of the free tools bundled in the Knoppix (or similar) boot CD?

In Knoppix 3.4's "system" folder, there's a Partition Magic clone called QTParted,
and also an item called Partition Image, which I'm guessing is like Drive Image.

P.I. says it's NTFS support is "experimental", which would be a problem for my Win2k & XP machines.


Looks like www.SysRescCd.org also mentions GNU Parted (is like QTParted I guess).

 

I used a Linux "System Rescue" boot CD a few months ago (I think that was the www.SysRescCd.org one). It was the first time I'd used Linux.

It was fiddly to get it to work correctly at first with my USB2 and SATA drives (I had to tinker with BIOS settings by a bit of trial and error), but it performed many great functions for free.

E.g. the partition manager enabled me to set up a dual boot system with ease, with two NTFS partitions. I was VERY glad not to have to buy Partition Magic to do that.

The "drive image"-esque tool was less easy to use - the interface wasn't as friendly, and it indeed only has limited NTFS support (because Micro$oft has copyrighted the NTFS drivers or something). That's one of the reasons I opted for Ghost in the end.

 

p.s. - forgot to say - it IS possible to access and image NTFS drives through the rescue environment, if I remember correctly, but the problem is that you have to extract the NTFS drivers from your Win installation into the Linux RAMdisk, which is rather complicated, because you need to work out the drive and directory numbers and names within the rescue environment.

Even an ardent Myst-player like me was stumped by this in the end. (heehee)

 

I am DEFINATELY more interested in RELIABLE imaging & restore, than I am in finding something "free".

(Anyone willing to summarize the pros/cons of the various packages mentioned in this LONG thread, in a table?)


====================

My co-worker J. just had issues using "PowerQuest Deploy Center 5.5", with SATA, on Win2k sp-4. Creating (fairly small) image of boot partition, onto second partition of same drive.

It failed the verify during creation, when he made a split-file image. (the error message was something like "1831 couldn't find image file"). He tried again without telling the software to split it, and that did verify.


BTW:
Deploy Center is what powerquest renamed "Drive Image Pro", just before symantec bought them out. We paid for an update-subscription, but were very disappointed when there were no updates--or even reduced-price upgrade paths--to one of the V2I generation products.

I agree with others' opinions... Symantec seems not as nice to work with as the companies they bought out were... Norton, PQ, etc...



UPDATE:
J. just re-imaged *without verifying* during creation of the split image files. Thus, no verify-failed error message.
Then he used the image browser to verify the image's integrity, OK. (Is this different than verifying during imaging? Does the verify option do a byte compare of the written image against the source partition, or does it just check for the image's internal consistancy?)
Finally he restored the image successfully.

 

Symantec says to try using a Win98 boot floppy, instead of Caldera DOS, if you get "Error 1831". Haven't tried that yet on this test partition.

 

With Ghost 9, which I believe uses the same file format as the software your colleague used, the "verification" operation is the same whether included as part of the backup job, or carried out manually later. It tests the internal consistency.

 

I've just gone through this whole thread and found many interestign and useful tips, so I'd liek to share my personal experience:

Allow me to point out that in my opinion the only 100% safe way to backup my active system partition is via DOS boot disk(floppy)/disc(CD/DVD) and Ghost 8.2 (from the Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition) has worked flawlessly with both mia VIA SATA RAID 1 array (KT880 + VT8237) and my NVIDIA SATA RAID 1 one (nForce 2) with decent backup and restore times and compression (about 4 mins with and Athlon XP 3200+ and 1 GB of low latency RAM, 3.5 GB partition -> 1.7 GB image).

What's more I've used Nero to create a bootable DVD with Ghost running via floppy emulation that's never failed me.

 

Forgot to mention that the boot disk/image I'm using is a standard Windows XP "MS-DOS" (Windows ME command.com in reality) startup disk.

 

Hi, I do not understand why risk important data with imaging products if they are so unreliable.
My goal is simple.
- I want to do a clean install of all critical software on my computer,
make sure no spyware, virus, etc. and create an image of it.
- And nothing else, so I want no background running and eating away of
my resources.

I would prefer to do a simple copy to dvd-r/rw to backup my data.
'If' the system somehow crash later, I can just restore it with the image and copy over my data from the dvd-r/rw.

Can anyone point me the direction to a software that can do that?
Which is best for 9x, Me, 2000, XP?

 

oh, in addition,
it would be best, if the image file created can be burn on a dvd-r/rw and the whole restoration process can be done with that disc alone.

I think this is something like a 'customized rescue disk'. With that, if my harddisk crashed totally, I can buy a new harddisk, pop in the 'rescue disc' and be back in bussiness within an hour.

Oh I tried Ghost 9, with XP NTFS file system.
Image creation, successful.
Image restoration, successful.
System boot, UNsuccessful.
(halt at Window Blue Logo screen)

 

Why not give Bootit NG a try?

 

One of the big retailers has a Western Digital 250 GB external HD on sale for $180 after rebates. I'm thinking of buying that to backup the two desktop PCs in my home, and two other desktops of family members in the city.

The Western Digital HD comes loaded with Dantz Retrospect Express. Can anyone tell me how Dantz works as a backup program? I've read earlier in this thread that Peter 2150 uses Dantz, but he also said just a few posts down that he uses Drive Snapshot. Why both, Peter?

Anyone know if you can control where Dantz stores the backup file image? I'd like to store an image on the PC's internal HD for convenience (or else I'll purchase Raxco's First Defense) as well as on the Western Digital external HD. But since the Dantz software resides on the external HD, perhaps I'll be limited to storing the backup images only on the external HD.

Anyone know if the Dantz software preloaded onto the Western Digital external HD can be used to back up all four family PCs? This would certainly be less costly than purchasing four individual copies of another backup software product.

My two family PCs both have 160 GB hard drives (each run Win XP), but the most utilized it only 8 GB full at present. The kids got iPods for Christmas and a digital camera will be a near future purchase, so I expect the HDs will fill up a little more.

nod32_9, I printed off the BootIt NG manual and I'm about half way through readiing it. One of my PCs is a Hewlett-Packard. As you probably know, the HP PCs contain a D: partition in which they place the backup copy of the operating system along with all the other junk they bundle with the PC. Will this D: partition cause any problems if I decide on using the BootIt partition creation and resizing functionality?

Thanks all, and regards,
Stro

 

Peter2150, thanks so much for the informative reply.

Having been saved by GoBack several times in the past, I do plan on purchasing Raxco's First Defense, unless of course the imaging software I finally purchase can save images on the internal hard drive as well as on the external HD.

You say you have the full version of Dantz Retrospect 6.5, not the lite "Express" version that comes bundled with Western Digital external HDs. So where does your Dantz software reside? On your PC's internal HD or on your firewire external HD? Do you have insight on whether I could save Dantz created backup files on my PC's internal HD given that Dantz Retrospect Express software is preloaded on the external Western Digital drive I'm considering buying?

You clarified in your post that Dantz is a backup program, not an imaging program. I must admit to not understanding the difference between backup and imaging programs. If Dantz will backup everything on your hard drive (and let's assume you don't partition your HD, which I know you don't, Peter) then if your PC's internal HD totally fails, why can't you simply restore everything (OS, application software, data files, music files, etc) from the Dantz backup file sitting on your external HD to you new, virgin internal HD?

I also don't understand the concept of the Dantz Disaster Recovery CD. Assuming you have up-to-date Dantz backup files on an external HD that can be used to restore your internal HD, then what is the Disaster Recovery CD used for?

Also, since you perform an incremental full disk backup daily using Dantz to your external HD, can't you use the Dantz backup to fix the problems you currently fix using First Defense? Why buy First Defense if the Dantz backup can fix the same problems? Clue me in on what I'm missing here.

Finally, you say your initial Dantz full disk backup took 35 minutes with daily incremental backups now taking 5 minutes. How many GB are you talking about?

Thanks again, Peter.
Regards,
Stro

 

Peter, thanks again for investing so much of your time to reply to me.

I understand now the difference in image software vs backup software. I'm reading the user manuals for BootIt and Image for DOS and I'll probably use one of those image programs, supplemented by Dantz Retrospect Express.

And thanks for the additional information on what you can do with First Defense...I didn't know. That information makes the software even more attractive.

Your First Defense paragraph did bring up a question, though. I know FD makes uncompressed snapshots of your C: partition, which in your case is your entire hard drive. And you have two FD snapshots sitting on your hard drive (primary & secondary snapshots, am I correct? I'm not familiar with FD terminology.). So when you say you have 18 GB on your hard drive, what are you talking about? Are you referring to all the GBs occupied by FD snapshots as well? Your Ghost and True Image software then has to image not only your native C: drive contents, but each uncompressed FD snapshot as well.

I agree the Dantz disaster recovery procedure does sound confusing. I wouldn't know how to slipstream in SP2, and my Hewlett-Packard PC didn't come with a Windows XP CD anyway (HP puts the backup copy of the OS in the D: partition). I'm leaving the Dantz disaster recovery system alone! Shouldn't need it if I image frequently enough.

One more question. Why do you keep a copy of purchased, downloaded software separately on your external HD? Since you have it copied already in First Defense, and are imaging it daily with Acronis TI, then why the separate external HD copy? Or, is this part of the redundant backup systems for mission critical restoration strategy?

Thanks again,
Stro

 

I have just spent a bunch of time fighting with Symatec's Ghost. Version 9 and version 2003. I have used this product in the past (many years ago) with sucess. However for my particular hardware Ghost would not work.

Beyond the product not working for duplicating drives, it went a step further and caused the loss of the entire drive, 3 times. Ghost mucks with the hard drive partitiion table, it uses it's own utilities to do this. And when the process failed it instructed me to use ghreboot, and or gdisk to repair the partitioning to get back to windows. These tools did not work. I found some info through google about others with same problem, and suggestions about booting from diskette or CD, neither helped.

I finally broke down and called tech support. 4 hours on hold (not an exaggeration) and I get a guy in India, he reads me the support article from symantec's web site ( in the 4 hours of waiting I had read and tried all of the fixes on their site) when these methods were not successful (a second time) he let me know that I would have to contact my PC manufacturer to have them help me re-image and re-install windows onto my hard drive.

I asked to speak with a higher level tech support person, maybe someone that could provide insight into the undocumented untilties ghreboot or gdisk and was told no one could help.

Luckly the machines we were working on were not full of impoortant data, just basic installs in a test environment, so I didn't lose any important information.

However, I tried Acronis TrueImage, and the Eval copy worked like a charm. No problems, no hassles, and fast.

Seems like a simple choice for me, a product that works for me over one that doesn't.

Your mileage may vary, the machine I was using is not a 'standard' pc it is a small profile motherboard used for industiral computers, and I have to believe ghost must work on some computers, but would still recomend True Image over Ghost based on my very recent and very painful experiences.

 

Also checkout my posts about Bootit NG. It is a more robust imaging software. You also get a partition manager and boot loader for only $35. You can try the fully functional software for 30 days.

Stay away from SYMANTEC and you will save a lot of time and $.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=346075#post346075

 

Does anyone have experience of the Paragon products such as Hard Disk Manager, Drive Backup, and Partition Manager?

http://www.paragon.ag/hdm/

http://www.drive-backup.com/

 

This is my long-winded experience with Ghost 9.

I've been having both a great time and horrible time with Ghost 9 for a solid week. I've been trying to Ghost three different winxp home pcs. I've come to the conclusing that there's no consistency on how Ghost 9 is going to work on anyone's given setup. Here's my feedback, tips, whatever you want to call it. Check this out........

I bought Ghost 9 and downloaded it from Symantec a couple of weeks ago. Unzipped it to the image file they send you. From there I burned about five copies of the cd with recordnow (as suggested by Symantec). Ok, I've got backup cds of the program and of course they're each bootable because that's the way the program is made. Just in case, I also saved the zip in case I ever have to make more program cds for myself. And, my one serial number works for every pc installation. Type in the serial, the program activates.

PC 1......a successful ghosting..eventually. I install Ghost on the first pc, a Compaq Presario p4 2.8. That machine has oem winxp which was originally full of the typical junk programs and apps that Compaq sends preloaded...which I had cleared off a few months ago. It's also one of those oem's that does NOT use a separate recovery partion for itself.

Anyway, I Ghosted that drive by choosing the "backup drive" option in the program, chose one of my hooked up dvd burners as the destination (an external Sony Drx500), chose the "single drive backup" option and away it went. About a half hour later, I had a finished dvd backup of the system on a dvd-r.

Now I turn the system off, stick in a brand new 80 gb WD drive that I partitioned and formatted (as a new storage drive...no os) with the WD tools utility (on another pc). Fresh new drive, no os.

Hour-long sidetrack #1...I pulled out the Presario c drive that I had just Ghosted, stuck in the new hard drive.....hooked up one of my old internal IDE nec burners for the restore (cuz I found out after four hours of trying that no matter what..THIS Ghost 9 on THIS system, refused to see any external usb drives during restore.....ok the best workaround was to simply put an internal dvd burner on one of the ide cables and, voila...the Ghost "advanced recovery of an entire drive" saw the internal dvd burner, saw my backup data.......and proceeded to restore my old c drive to the new 80 gb drive.

For restore options, I chose, "verify errors after restore", "restore mbr", "make drive bootable".

Hour-long sidetrack #2....I found out is that Symantec has the WRONG instructions on a couple of crucial steps...or at least they worked WRONG for this machine...First of all, at the start of the recovery stage, there is a point where you have the program disk in and are prompted to "browse" to where the backup data is. Of course, the backup data is on a different dvd/cd than the program. No biggie...BUT, the instructions say to put in your data cd/dvd before you hit the "browse" button. WRONG. You have to hit "browse" WHILE the program cd is still in there because it's gonna look for some additional program info before it actually starts "browsing". If you take the program cd out when Symantec tells you, guess what? The whole program hangs and you have to reboot the whole pc back from the program cd again and start over. Bottom line after an hour of messing around is that I figured out to hit "browse" with the program cd in and THEN, after the next browse window comes up..take the program cd out and stick in my data dvd. And even then, it takes a few seconds for the program to re-situate itself to give me a directory of the backup image on the dvd.

Hour-long sidetrack #3 .....On backup data spanned across several cds or dvds, the restore program will prompt you to put the next cd/dvd in. Just be careful that when you put the next cd/dvd in DON'T close the tray. i found out after three hours of failed restore attempts that when you put the next cd/dvd in, just click "ok" on the program and let IT close the tray. Otherwise, guess what? You close the tray manually, click ok, and the program gets all screwed up and says you put in the wrong cd/dvd. Guess what again? You have to exit the restore program and start all over. Is this documented anywhere? Nope.

I essentially blew a half a day ghosting and restoring the Presario, but at least I had some procedure notes for myself and the new drive did boot up just fine with everything completely intact.

Now..Iwanted to have a third hard drive ready to go for the Presario...a drive that wouldn't have any online stuff etc. So, with the experience I had, I took out the newly Ghosted 80gb drive and proceeded to do the whole procedure again with another new 80gb drive. This procedure went smooth. Install the newly formatted drive, boot the Presario from the Ghost 9 cd, and restore the data dvd following MY procedures developed from the previous try.

Worked perfect. Had the whole thing done in less than an hour or two. I can now put any of the three drives in the Presario (one at a time of course) and pc/ winxp boots fine, all my programs work fine, and each drive consists of a slightly different layout of stuff. And to be safe, I installed Ghost on each of those two new drives after I had them set up and Ghosted those setups for if/when those drives crash in the future.
---------------------------------------------------------

NOW...hey I'm feeling pretty good about the procedure so I turn to my HP P4 and intend to do the very exact same thing, only this time with a fresh standalone version of Winxp that I bought at Staples. This version comes already mounted with SP1.

I install the standalone win xp. Upgrade the security stuff but not to SP2. I install Ghost 9. I backup to my external dvd burner again. Set Backup to verify. Verifies as a-ok.

Stick in a new hard drive to the HP, start the "restore" program of Ghost 9 to see if it sees my external Sony burner (Once again...NOPE, it doesn't...even though the Symantec site and Gear site specifically list this burner as supported). No biggie. I already KNOW the workaround. I hook up the internal nec burner to the Hp, start up the Ghost restore, and everything whirls by.

At the end of the restore to the new drive, I take out the Ghost cd, and reboot the pc, expecting it to come up just like the Presario did.

Ehh..wrong answer. Pc won't boot. After days of experimenting my final results are either messages about hardware not reading boot correctly, or simply a hanging dos cursor blinker at boot....SO....

4 day long sidetrack #1...to date, I can not restore Ghost backup images to the HP no matter what I try. I can put a Ghosted hp drive into the d drive slot of any other pc in here and visually see that the program folders that Ghost put on the new drive are all there. They all look to be intact. But the drive(s) (I've now tried this on two brand new drives on the HP will not boot.
You can give all sorts of opinions, but I probably already tried them after long, boring reading about Ghost problems. I've tried all of the following so far on this pc........

Backup using different backup media/burners (I have three different brand dvd/cd burners and plenty of various media). Tried them all.

...Load the HP oem winxp on the pc and try Ghosting that kind of system setup (as had worked fine with the Presario)

Do another fresh install of standalone xp and then upgrade to SP2 and try to Ghost.

Format the new drives to all zeros with killdisk and then re-partition.....or don't partition......format via winxp internal drive setup routine..format with WD data tools.

Use Ghost's "disk copy" feature instead of first ghosting.

Ghost the image to a second hard drive in the system instead of dvd and then try a recovery of that image to a newly formatted drive.

Use "restore mbr" on recovery. Don't use "restore mbr"...I've tried both ways.

Use "disk signature". Don't use disk signature. Tried both.

Tried to do the whole thing with WD, Maxtor, and Seagate drives.

tried every different which-way bios boot setting.

Everything above........tried them all.

About the only thing I haven't gotten into yet is this third party routine called BootItNg that somehow rewrites or resets the disk signature...which Ghost 9 is supposed to do automatically.......and apparently did do okay with on those earlier reinstalls on the Presario. Maybe I'll look at that, maybe not.

-----------

One last thing I tried. I went back to the Presario for a test. I bought another wd drive this weekend (they're so inexpensive now) and formatted it yesterday using the wd tools (as a storage drive, no os).

I stuck this drive in the Presario, pulled out my standalone WinXP box and did a fresh install of that XP on the Presario (the previous successful ghosting on the Presario was with Compaq oem Winxp). After installing the standalone winxp, (and having to call Microsoft on the phone to get the code for activating it) I updated the security stuff, updated to service pak 2 (as I had done on the HP), installed Ghost, and did a backup of the entire drive.

I then immediately erased the new drive (cuz I didn't have any more empty drives around to play with). I wrote the drive with zeros with killdisk and then reformatted it again to empty it all out (yeah I know this is all taking a lot of time). Then, with the new drive empty again, I recovered the drive on the Presario, using the same setup I've used for all these tests.

Worked fine. The drive, created from the Ghost, boots up fine on the Presario. Everything's intact.

Ghost loves the p4 Presario and all flavors of software. Ghost does not like it's HP cousin. Of course that's just here in my house. I have the feeling every problem out there regarding Ghost is a result of often un-traceable and unrepeatable issues.
---------------------

I have concluded that it doesn't matter whether one is trying to ghost a standalone Winxp or an oem xp. It doesn't matter whether or not SP2 is involved. There are just some pieces of equipment that Ghost 9 is not going to successfully restore on. IF YOU HAVE FURTHER OPINIONS/INPUT, I'D SURE APPRECIATE YOUR COMMENTS.

As you can tell if you've read all this, I could have done fresh reinstalls and manual tweaking of a bunch of drives faster than trying to figure out Ghost 9.

Until I get better info, I'll probably do just that. Use Ghost on the Presario and simply have a couple of extra system drives (manually set up) around for the eventual inevitable crashes. And continue to keep my data backed up on dvd and not lose track of where all my program cd's are kept.

Needless to say, I've not even attempted to deal with any of this on the third HP pc that's here.

 

I am running a MSI MS-6570E motherboard with an onboard nVidia SATA RAID controller. I am running a RAID 0 configuration with to WD 120GB SATA drives. True Image 8.0 boot disk does NOT support this RAID controller in the RAID 0 configuration.

 

Hi Westair,

I'm using an MSI board with an nForce3 250GB chipset. I have two SATA Raptors in RAID 0 (NVRAID), so we have similar setups. TrueImage will not work with NVRAID. Let me repeat that---TrueImage will not work with NVRAID! ATI may allow you to create an image of your RAID array, but it will not restore that image. I used TrueImage to restore an image I had made with the 'Safe' Boot CD and ended up with the following:
1) Loss of C:\
2) Loss of D:\, a data partition that I wasn't even trying to restore
3) Loss of 300MB of data, mostly MP3s that I can slowly recover. My CD backups had all my very important docs, thank goodness.
4) Loss of my RAID 0 array entirely

Needless to say, I immediately began looking for another imaging program. I thought of using Ghost 9, but its compatibility with RAID was unsure. It also requires .NET framework and activation; besides, it's huge and it's made by Symantec.

I finally tried TeraByte Unlimited's Image For Windows and DOS and I couldn't be more pleased. It worked flawlessly in creating and restoring images in NVRAID, both OS and data partitions. IFW has a small 2MB footprint and the GUI is very simple---no bells 'n ' whistles like TrueImage. But unlike TrueImage, it can restore images to NVRAID. TeraByte Unlimited offers a full-featured 30-day trial version and bundles Image For Windows and Image For DOS for $27US. Money well spent considering that Acronis TrueImage doesn't work and costs at least $40US.

Regards
Spitting Image

 

Bootit NG (from the same vendor) is more powerful and robust. However, if IFW/IFD works for you, then there is not need to switch.

Let me repeat, DO NOT touch bloated PIGWARE like GHOST, and TRUE IMAGE.