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Part II: Building Your Image

A Little Review

In our last tip, we discussed creating an image of your system (a complete copy of your hard drive including the OS and applications) using Norton Ghost and an external USB drive. Norton Ghost is the most widely used program for backing up your system and/or building a new one. In most cases, a secondary/external hard drive, CD-R, or DVD-R is used to store the image because of their convenience and affordability. Which one you choose will depend on the size of the image you are storing.

Last week you learned how to create a bootable floppy supporting different devices. This week we want to show you how to clone a drive or partition, not with the use of a bootable floppy, but by using the Windows wizard, which will walk you through the entire process.

Get To The Cloning

First, let's create the back-up.

• Start Norton Ghost.
• Go to Ghost Basic and click Backup. The Backup Wizard window will prompt you through the process.
• Click Next to continue.
• Select the source drive or partition you would like to back-up (like your hard drive, usually C:) from the Source box.
• Select the media you wish to use (CD-R, DVD-R, external drive, etc) to save the image to in the Destination section, then click Next.
• You have the option to put your own description in the Image description box, then click Next. There are Advance settings you can also configure, however using Norton Ghost’s default settings should work.

The wizard will continue explaining what to expect when your system reboots and also displays the configuration setting it will be using. Make sure you save and close any other programs that may be open.

• At this point, you will be given the option to create a Disaster Recovery disk in the case of a system failure.
• Click Run Now. The system will reboot to PC-DOS and begin building the back-up image in Ghost DOS mode.

Once the wizard finishes, your system will reboot back to Windows.

Click here to see the above in action.

Restoring The Clone

Restoring your image is very similar to building one. This time, instead of selecting Backup from Ghost Basic, choose Restore. You'll follow the same process as above except that this time you want to restore your image. The wizard will prompt you to specify the source image and destination drive on which to extract the Ghost image to. Just as we did when building our image, the system will reboot in DOS mode and restore the selected image to the drive you intend to restore the clone to.

This is the basic function of Norton Ghost and having the ability to use the same concept via a network, peer-to-peer computers, external devices, CD-R, DVD-R, or another hard drive or partition proves to be a very valuable tool for system builders and network administrators.

Read CNET's review of Norton Ghost 2003

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