backup drive

Hello guys I hope I have the correct forum ,anyway I need advise on which is the best program to backup my hard drive? I want to use the minimum amount of cds in order to acomplish this. I was told I can use nero or ghost . I hope some one can give some ideas if this 2 programs are the best or try a different one . thanks you--- jose

 

Ghost has a big advantage in that if you make a bootable restore CD set, you can restore from scratch if it's required, say the HD dies.

 

Thank you very much for this information ,I think I can get a copy of norton ghost enterprise edition, do you know if it suports cdrws?

 

I believe it does, if it's the newest version, 7.5. I know that GHOST 2003 supports CD-RW, that's what I use here.

 

I just find out the the ghost enterprise version that I can get is 7.0, This is going to be the fist time I use this program and I don't want to mess up my system by using it wrong , can you let me know how to create an image ,I would really apreciate it.

 

After installing GHOST on your machine, you run the boot wizard to create a boot floppy for the actual backup operation. When you are creating the boot disk, I recall there were options for either a CD writing disk or a restore disk, so you may actually have to make two of them. It's been a while since I used that one. In any case, you'll see the options when you run the boot wizard, on 7.5 the options exist as I described them, I just checked. The CD can be made bootable with 7.5, I don't know about 7.0.

 

I prefer to not make it bootable since the ghost I usually use is on my second hard drive. The standard recording of the CD makes it restore the same way as my second hard drive image which means I won’t have to remember what is different about restoring a bootable. I’m not suggesting you do it that way, but that it isn’t a big deal if your version doesn’t do bootable CDs.

My version (home 2002) tries to install an IBM DOS on the boot floppy unless you intervene to use MS DOS. Some computers have problems with the IBM version – I think it is called PC DOS. I made both just out of curiosity and my computer wilonly work with MS DOS. The enterprise edition might not be so cheap as to refuse to pay M$ a dime for their DOS.

This is a good overview: http://radified.com/Ghost/ghost_1.htm

 

Thank you for the information ,I'll try to make the image tonight or tomorow ,I'll let you know how it went.

 

I got the enterprise edition , and I downloaded the radified guide to norton ghost ,hopefully everything will go as plan ,I'll let you when I'm done

 

FWIW, I've had one serious bug surface with GHOST 2003. I have a system with an Adaptec 19160 SCSI host adapter, and a couple of IDE drives. It boots from the SCSI drive, and the IDE drives are for archives and backup.

I attempted to do an partition image from the SCSI drive to one of the IDE drives, and the run completed apparently OK. When I went to look at the image on the IDE drive, the image was bad, and worst yet, the FAT on that drive was scrambled! I then tried a complete disk image of the whole drive to the other IDE, and the same thing happened to it!

Now, obviously, I had backups of all the stuff on these drives, so my "loss" was limited to a few hours of one computer copying stuff to another computer, but it's a point to ponder.

The interesting thing is that I've done the same operation from a system where the only difference was an Adaptec 2940UW host adapter, and no problems occured in the process. I guess the moral of this story is to always have more than one backup.

 

hello I have tried make my image but unfortunately it has been unsucesful ,I'm getting an error massege that cd can't be close, I check norton knowledge base and It looks that my cd-rw is not on their supported list ,I'm going to try again this time I'm going to change the pc dos files on my booable disk to ms dos ,also I'm going to include a driver for my cd.rw .hopefully this will work. (any ideas)