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Building Your Image

Today's tip comes to you courtesy of one of our readers, Mike. He wrote in asking us to talk about how to use Ghost Imaging with an external USB device. Thanks for the request and we hope this helps!

Why Create An Image?

An image is a compressed file that contains a complete copy of your hard drive including operating system, applications, and data files. These days, it’s become a necessity to religiously create a back-up of not only your data, but your entire hard drive as well. Why would you need to do this?

The answer is two fold. One, there will come a time when something goes wrong with your PC and you will need to restore your system back to a point where it was working properly. While your OS (Operating System) features different ways to restore your system “to the last known good point”, like a restore point built into XP, in many cases a simple restore is not enough. Two, you may need to upgrade to a bigger hard drive or replace a drive that's dying.

In either case, an image file comes in quite handy for restoring your system.

What To Use

One of the most common utility programs used to do this is Norton Ghost. Symantec's Norton Ghost is currently on version 9.0 (or 2003), upgraded from version 2002, and incorporates expanded capabilities for handling a number of scenarios. The program can send drive images across a network or copy images to an external drive using a parallel or USB cable. The latest version also allows you to burn images to CD-R or CD-RW discs.

The program also offers a wide range of compression and security settings, including an option that permits images to be cloned only to machines whose BIOS includes a specified text string, such as a product name.

Getting Started

To build an image using an external USB drive, you will need to use a Windows version of the program to create a bootable floppy disk with the DOS hardware driver for your USB controller. The Ghost program itself needs to be run from the floppy disk and not in Windows.

• Start by opening Norton Ghost.
• Click on Ghost Utilities, then select Standard Ghost Boot Disk and click Next.
• You will be prompted with a configuration window for what type of boot disk you wish to create.
• Check the box for USB support.
• In the Advance option there are two types of USB host controllers - Universal and Open Host. If you are not sure which one to use just select All Drivers for both.
• Click Next to continue.

The next step is choosing the DOS version you want installed on the bootable disk. Norton Ghost comes with PC-DOS, but if you prefer MS-DOS, make sure you have a bootable disk with MS-DOS on it.

Finishing up

Continue with the wizard as it prompts you for 2 floppy disks to complete the process. When you're done, you can reboot your PC using the disk you just created. While in the DOS version of the program, you will note that there is now an assigned drive letter for the external USB drive. Now you can pretty much use this drive as the destination path for any image you would like to create.

Click here to see the above steps in action. The video may take a few seconds to load.

Next week's tip: we will discuss how you can use Ghost in cloning, restoring, and building images for different applications.

Stay tuned...

Disclaimer - The Micro 2000 Tech Tip is a free service providing information only. While we use reasonable care to see that this information is correct, we do not guarantee it for accuracy, completeness or fitness for a particular purpose. Micro 2000, Inc. shall not be liable for damages of any kind in connection with the use or misuse of this information.