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Ghosting - Will it work?!?
Thursday, 16 December, 2004
My dad’s system was hit with a bad virus. I cleaned it and now he wants me to reformat it. However, the PC is a business computer at home and his documents are everywhere. If I ghost the drive to my hard drive via network, reformat and reinstall XP Pro (it has gone through upgrades of Win 95, 98, 98se and XP Home!!) can I restore the Internet settings, IP addresses and so on? He trusts me and I have a good understanding of computers.
My PC specs are:
- 1.5 GHz P4,
- ASUS P4T motherboard,
- 256M RAMBUS RAM,
- 40G HDD (Quantum Fireball),
- GeForce 2 MX200 64M graphics card.
Dad’s PC specs are"
- AMD Athlon XP 1500+,
- MSI Motherboard,
- 256M SDRAM,
- 30G Seagate Hard Drive,
- Onboard graphics.
Does it matter weather the components are different?
Will I have any conflicts?
Also, if I install his apps on my hard drive (40G, 1.5 GHz P4) in my system, can I put it in his system (AMD 1700+) to replace his 30G hard drive?
Thanks,
Matthew Dimond, Doveton, VIC
 Personally, I don't like ghosting hard drives - too many things can go wrong. When I rebuild a system, the way I prefer to do it is to backup all of the required data/personal folders (yes, it's a pain and there's the possibility of missing something but done properly it works) then wipe the drive clean. Next, install Windows, the motherboard device drivers, graphics card drivers, DirectX, my apps and then recopy my data files back to the drive.
I wouldn't install the apps on your drive on your system if you plan to give it to your dad. The reason is that the operating system and driver software will be for your PC's motherboard, not his. By the time you move the drive over, it's likely Windows XP wouldn't boot - apart from bloody product activation, it hates it when you swap motherboards and generally crashes and burns.
Remember to grab his "favourites" folder and his email, apart from everything else.
(Or you could get your dad to buy a new hard disk and you could install that as the boot drive, and do a clean install of XP and the apps. That way he'd still have the old drive as a precaution, and you could slowly migrate the data files from the old drive [D: or E: or whatever you make it]. Ghosting wouldn't do anything for you in this case. -Paul Zucker)Darren Yates
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Pete BeaumontPosted: 20/12/2004 re: Ghosting - Will it work?!? Ghosting will work ... but why??? When you restore from the copy, you will just be putting the "crap" back. If files are stored everywhere, it looks like you'll just have to do things the long (and messy) way - what applications does he use? if excel and Word, you'll have to find all *.doc, *.xls + template files and copy them somewhere else (you'll have to see what extensions the programs generate and search for them - then weed out the ones that aren't work files). Favourites and address book can be exported no problem. Personally, I use a utility called ebackup (it's a great shareware product available from http://www.inachis.com/index.htm). For my backups, I have a second (identical) drive and XCOPY the whole kit and kaboodle at least once a week. A bit of a pain, but when something goes wrong, I only lose a couple of days work at most.
Oh ... and Internet settings .... why bother. Just write them down - it only takes a couple of minutes to enter a couple of phone numbers and ip addresses (sometimes ebackup will save pop and smtp details for you) ChrisPosted: 16/12/2004 re: Ghosting - Will it work?!? I use ghost for this sort of thing all the time. I would check to ensure that you can see the files and restore them from the image file using ghost explorer.
Once you are sure that you have a good image file then you can rebuild the PC and restore the data from the image using ghost explorer.
You could also run the XP file & settings transfer wizard to back-up to a folder on your hard drive. Admiral MichaelPosted: 16/12/2004 re: Ghosting - Will it work?!? I wouldnt ghost is as in copy exactly to a hard drive. I would partition the drive or install a secondary, and ghost the C: to the D: but make an image file. This will make a ghost image thats a file and could either remain on the partition or burned to CD/DVD.
So install the driver, software, updates and whatnot and ghost it. Then when it fooks up again, you would have to still back up documents but the software and updates would still be there and you would be a little ahead then having to format.
You could also get him to place the documents in a folder or two and get a backup software that would copy it to a drive or something. |