speaking of backup solutions...

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 4:30 pm

i just rebuilt my trusty Dell 8300 and consolidated the hard drives, etc. a 72gb raptor is the only internal drive now and has a sparkly clean install of XP Pro on it. i'd like to use Ghost to image it and then do periodic backups from there, of course.

the one problem is that i don't have a floppy drive in it. i would like to image to an external USB drive (or internal dvd burner).

i remember going through some pain getting a bootable CD with ghost to work to do this...and that was a few years ago and i can't remember the process.

any tips?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 5:57 pm

Wouldn't it just be easier to install a floppy? Internal floppy costs $10 (although if you're like me you probably have a half dozen lying around). An external USB floppy costs around $28 shipped:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 208&depa=0

And yes you can boot from an external USB floppy. I carry one around when I work on a client's computer that doesn't have one.

I've no experience with creating bootable CDs but you could download the Ultimate Boot CD and then add Ghost to it (I was thinking of doing this myself, but it's just easier to use a floppy): http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

It can be customized to add additional apps that need to be booted.

Another option is to buy the newer version of Ghost which works from within Windows. You can even set it up on a schedule. Personally I prefer the DOS based Ghost - there's a LOT of reasons why I don't trust Windows to make a proper image of itself while it's running and the state of Windows changes during the image process.

Another idea: Since you're planning on using an external USB drive to save the image to anyway, you can format the USB drive as FAT32 and make it bootable (format /S with a Win98 Emergency disk) and put a copy of Ghost on it. Most mobos will boot from a USB drive if you make "Removable drives" a higher boot priority than the internal drive.

So when you want to make the Ghost image, plug in the USB drive, and reboot. Put an autoexec.bat file othe USB drive to execute Ghost automatically.

Since you'll be using FAT32 make sure to use the following command line parameters for Ghost to prevent it from making any image files larger than 4Gb (max file size under FAT32). It'll just make several image files under 4 Gb in size. Works fine. I make all my images in 700Mb "chunks" so they can easily be burned to CD.

ghost.exe -split=3700 -auto

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 8:11 pm

k...i scavenged a floppy from another pc (i don't have any spares) and put it into the pc temporarily.

i still can't get an image...ghost recognizes all of the drives (sata and usb enclosure) when i'm asked for a source disk/partition...but when i am prompted for a file name and to select the drive to save to i only get the floppy drive and my dvd-rw as choices...the sata and external disappear from the list!

if i try to save to cd-r it starts the process and then fails as soon as it begins to burn. grrrrr.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 9:33 pm

What version of Ghost? Versions prior to 2003 won't save an image to an NTFS partition. They only FAT32 drives will show up as a valid destination.

Sounds like you have an older Ghost.

You can always reformat the USB drive FAT32. Just remember WinXP won't format a FAT32 partition larger that 32Gb. You need to use a Win98 Emergency disk and FDisk it (or use something like partition magic).

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 9:57 pm

as usual...you are right again, FP!

all of the partitions i was targeting are NTFS...so i just added a smaller FAT32 so i can dump to that. to improve my current ghetto process i'm going to pick up a USB floppy drive and dedicate a FAT32 usb hard drive for this.

thanks again-