I have a few different partitions, one for windows, one for linux, and one to share (fat32). Is there a way to ghost the whole hard drive so I could put it back the way it is now at anytime? How exactly does a ghost image work?

Norton Ghost is a good one for this if i recall . . . i've never done it for a full harddrive, but i've used it years ago to create a identical copy of windows with all the required settings for distribution on similar machines . . .

 

If you've ever downloaded something which could be booted, like a distro of linux, they arrive in ISO form, which is then burnt to a disk, this image file is then bootable . . . i believe ghosting programs do the same . . . though how it would cope with anything larger than 1 disk i don't know . . i guess they compress and link over a number of cds . . . and i don't know what happens if you move it to a diffrent hardware setup, being XP it'll probably cope ok, but its not guaranteed.

what i find more convienient is to install ext2 ifs into windows, and either tell windows to mount your linux drive and linux to mount your windows drive, so that you have read access to your windows files from linux, and read-write to your linux files from windows, or set up an ext2 share partition (didn't like what i heard about fat32 + power outage = fat32 - data).

 

works for me, tho hibernating is apparently a no-no (as with a shared fat32 partition).

 

doesn't anwre your OP atall, tho

But how would a ghost image of a hard drive fit on a disk? What exactly is stored on a ghost image?

A "ghost" image is a bit-for-bit copy of the contents of the drive. Unless it's compressed, it would take up exactly as much space as the content of the drive.

A "ghost" image is a bit-for-bit copy of the contents of the drive. Unless it's compressed, it would take up exactly as much space as the content of the drive.

 

So a ghost image is usually on multiple disks, like DVDs? A ghost image of my hard drive would be eight or nine DVDs! This computer came with one CD that conatains a ghost image (I hate it, comes with all these useless programs that load at startup) for windows, how is that possible?

This computer came with one CD that conatains a ghost image (I hate it, comes with all these useless programs that load at startup) for windows, how is that possible?

 

-------> startup items can me disabled with msconfig (start - - run - - msconfig)

 

When i rolled out several identical machines that needed identical XP settings i remember making a ghost of the first to save time . . . a fresh install of xp + office + settings . . 3Gb? that fitted onto one disk (im fairly sure) and by disk i mean CD you see this was 5-6 years ago when those dvd burners were mainly unheard of, and the readers were still damn expensive!

 

It took ages to make, and im guessing its compression . . damn good compression . . . a good thing to do would be to google 'Symantec Ghost' and see what the write ups say

Ah, compression. I think I may try it.

 

Thanks for the start up item edit tip, I've been using spybot search and destroy to do that, but this is better!