Topic: Cloning disk with Norton Ghost

[Ness]

Hi,

I've not yet attempted this and would like some advice.

There are a few postings that relate to Ghost and, from what I have seen, all refer to situations where Ghost has already been used and the cloned drive is created. I need help in the creation process though!

My questions are:

- Is Ghost easy to use on SME?
- Is there a specific version I need?
- Is there a "how to clone a drive" note that isn't posted on contribs that can be made available?
- Some have referred to keeping certain partitions the same size (boot etc)... what does this mean and why is it important and where is this selected?
- Can Ghost be run over a LAN where the new HDD is in a second machine.
- Does this machine have to be running SME?

I'd appreciate any guidance before I invest or break something!

Thanks

Chris

[lightman]

Hi Ness

I recommend you to use Ghost 8 Enterprise version
to do this, It claims to support Linux very well
and can do multicasting (read below).

The way I do it usually, is create a boot diskette (or CD) with the DOS packet driver for the nic board that has the machine to be clonned, and then load ghost
all from the boot disk.

On the remote machine (I use W2000 for that) load
Ghost multicast server, and connect to the remote
machine using the same multicast session name

(remember that the dos machine to be cloned needs
a proper DHCP obtained IP, otherwise you have to
specify manually, if you are clonning a SME server
it is likely that you won't have other DHCP
server around so you must do it)

I have always worked with windows partition, never
did it with a linux one, ghost 8 claims that it
can work with ext2, ext3 partitions without problem
however I've heard on other boards that they have
problems with clonned swap partitions.

that's all i can tell you, multicast ghost is a great
tool, but I'm not sure about how useful is with
linux.

c-u
lightman

[axessit]

I have used Ghost to clone a Red-Hat drive before no problems. I have used both boot to network drive, with main ghost executable on there. If you want to boot up a machine and clone via the network, you need to make up two boot disks with different fixed IP addresses.

Ghost is a windows programme that includes all the necessary utilities to make up the boot disks. You can use it to back up an image to CDR as well. I find it faster to actually remove the drives and ghost within a machine rather than going via the LAN.

[MSmith]

Done it many times, going to do it tonight to get data from a failing HDD with a SME install (will fix with "upgrade" install from CD).  If going from smaller to bigger disk, Norton will offer to resize all partitions:  /, /swap and /boot.  I tell it to leave /boot alone, because it's already the size it needs to be, and I adjust /swap if necessary to reflect any changes in installed RAM.  I tell Ghost to give / everything else on the new drive.

[mapangojoe]

Hi,

I've not yet attempted this and would like some advice.

There are a few postings that relate to Ghost and, from what I have seen, all refer to situations where Ghost has already been used and the cloned drive is created. I need help in the creation process though!

My questions are:

- Is Ghost easy to use on SME?
- Is there a specific version I need?
- Is there a "how to clone a drive" note that isn't posted on contribs that can be made available?
- Some have referred to keeping certain partitions the same size (boot etc)... what does this mean and why is it important and where is this selected?
- Can Ghost be run over a LAN where the new HDD is in a second machine.
- Does this machine have to be running SME?

I'd appreciate any guidance before I invest or break something!

Thanks

Chris

I use a product called Ghost4Linux or g4l for short.  I downloaded it from sourceforge last year.  I have used it since to clone Win9X, Win2K, XP, and many versions of Linux.  I hope that helps!

Chris Curtis