![]() ![]() It took another half an hour with my PCs slow CD burner, of course, but that is the price for safety and reliability. Just to stay on the safe side, I asked Ghost to verify the newly burnt Cds, which it did and confirmed they were all good. The rest was all intuitive steps through Ghost menu: choosing the source backup partition C, the destination CD burner, confirming to make the first CD bootable, selecting the current floppy as the source for boot sector and DOS files, choosing no compression – and it flied! In half an hour Ghost.exe spit out four CDs, the first one being bootable and the four together now contain my PC’s C-partition image. I remembered all my days spent reading through documentation, forums, blogs, Symantec web site help section, talking to friends etc, if only I would have known the answer is inside just one cool DOS executable called Mister Ghost.exe! I said to myself “If only an idiot like me could put at least a fraction of this power to do the bootable backup work… and those drivers which are missing are not letting me use all this power of Ghost.exe.”Ĭouple cups of coffee later and much sooner than I expected after the whole week of frustration of being not smart enough, and thinking I am complete idiot, I start feeling I am close to some important discovery… and it happened!īrowsing around Image Save menu I suddenly saw the list of ALL drives my little old laptop has – Ghost is so smart it actually showed the CD burner, recognizing its model… OMG! Even though I skipped all config and autoexec settings and none of the generated diskette drivers have been loaded at this point at all! But Ghost is cool to see my HDD partitions, floppy and the CD burner!Īt this point I felt like a total, round and complete idiot. Of course I enjoyed reading the command line options panel – very rich functionality is there. I looked through each and every menu choice it has. ![]() Ghost.exe is worth looking at it, a clean and beautiful program. I started browsing the diskette, paying attention to details and, finally, discovered and ran the Ghost.exe by itself from the diskette subdirectory it was sitting in. I did one thing differently this time – I would not let it run its config.sys and autoexec.bat files. So I de-installed Ghost from XP completely, stuck in the diskette it generated and booted from it. So after a week of beating my head against the Ghost wall, I was very close to giving up and thought “Well, presumably Ghost is cool software, but, as you became old and silly, you cannot comprehend it, so just forget it all together”.īut the thought about other people mentioning in their posts that Ghost is capable of making a bootable CD would not let me give up completely. ![]() I could not figure out how, where from and which drivers exactly to add to Ghost’s configuration setup panel before Ghost creates the bootable floppy, which I am supposed to use later to burn my bootable set of Cds, containing the image of my PC C-partition. My main problem was the bootable floppy produced by Ghost could not find some needed Adaptec drivers for the CD-burner. Well to make a long story short, I have spent a week trying to follow videos, reading through Ghost documentation and digging through smarter than I am people’s blogs and forums, but still I could not make the Ghost installed in Windows XP produce a bootable set of backup Cds of my C-partition. I installed it and after watching several videos was so happy that now a bootable backup will be possible. This let’s me experiment with my machine’s C-partition and if I screw it up, then quickly restore it to its nice and shiny pre-screw-up condition.Įventually came along Norton Ghost 2003, available as free download for a month. Well, I have tried several backup programs which came along with my PC’s, laptops or OEM manufactured CD/DVD burners, such as Nero or Sonic, but I could not figure out how to create bootable set of CDs so I could just stick them one by one into my dead machine and get it up and running to the snapshot stop point in half an hour. ![]() I would have to spend a day or two, or sometimes three, to install the OS – in my case Windows XP, get the internet up and running, get all the drivers and tune up my C-partition to a perfect working condition. So I wanted to find a relatively easy solution to make a snapshot of the perfectly working C-partition of my laptop and be able to restore it quickly in case of disaster, which I normally cause when trying new hardware or new version of drivers on my PC hardware. I hope you have never lost your machine’s bootable and carefully tuned OS partition, often referred to as the C-partition, but I did, and couple of times. ![]()
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