Bootable Ghost Image of HDD.

[arvindK]

Needed to create a bootable image of the HDD, so that I could just reboot from the CD and restore to a particular state.

Tried out Acronis True Image v8 and Symantec Norton Ghost v9, but both create an exact image of the entire drive (blank space included), which ends up to be huge. And both need to make a bootable floppy to load the images from the CD or any media the images are stored in.

I'd been using some s/ware some time back, I think it was an older version of Symantec Ghost, which had a feature where you could just make a bootable image of the OS and data part, thereby omitting the blank space and with compression this image could be written on one single CD.

Could someone suggest any s/ware to do this. Or maybe some setting's which I might be required on the above mentioned softwares.

And I do have an unattended CD, but wanted have a sort of image of the drive to restore from.

thanks.

[brelfielfan]

I used norton ghost 9, and it will burn your hard drive image (just files, not blank space) to dvds if you have a dvd burner. You can also compress it. I had a 40 gig hd, and the image was 9 gigs uncompressed, but norton compressed it to about 4.3 (or something) and it barely fit on a dvd. Then you can just boot to the dvd, or a disk, and reghost it.

it is a pain in the butt, norton is difficult, but it is possible.

[firefoxthebomb]

Norton Corp Ed. will do the trick too.

Note: Before I make an image of a computer using norton I do some cleanup first. Delete all temp files, and internet temp files. Empty Recycle been. Turn off system restore, (this will delete your restore points) which may have gigs worth of backups, then reboot to dos mode and delete the hybernation file and the pagefile which will free up some space. I can get an xp install backed up to about 3 gigs after doing these steps.

[ner]

I have recently made a bootable cd that loads:

usb drivers

and ghost...

i'm using 2003 version and wit this bootable cd you can run ghost/restore an image from cd/dvd or usb hard drive

works great!...

[arvindK]

Thanks to all for the replies.

brelfielfan - Could you provide more details, regards the settings etc. I've been unable to do what you suggest. I'm having a 7gb partition for WinXp which is having over 5gb of unused space. I used high compression and what I got was a 663mb file which is though compact is not bootable.

firefoxthebomb - Will give Norton a try. And I did clean up the sys of all temp files, prefetch, offline pages, temp files, cache, etc, before I did the above mentioned image. And I'd even done a defrag to keep the files nice and tight. And I already have the restore option disabled on my pc.

ner - That's just what I wanted to do, create a bootable Ghost image. Are you referring to Norton 2003 ??

EDIT - Seems like there is already a thread on this issue HERE. My apologies for not using the search option first.

Edited August 23, 2005 by arvindK

[ner]

Yes its norton ghost 2003 i am using, and if you like i can send you the disk image (all you will have to do is copy your ghost exe file and your image and your off??

ner

[arvindK]

ner - Norton Ghost 2003 was the exact s/ware, that did the trick. Though it does need to reboot to dos. But this app solved my prob. Created a spaned bootable (hi-compressed) image of the HDD. Thanks.