Hello,
       I'm a user of Ghost 2003 and when I make images I usually try to minimize its size. To this end, I remove the page file. I have 2GB of RAM on my laptop so that my pagefile.sys file is big and is around 2500 MB.  After cloning back the system, I used to set the page file again.

My question is whether removing the pagefile before making an image indeed makes the latter smaller. I've noticed before that it gets smaller. Very recently I made an image of a minimal  XP system (with Windows itself around 1400 MB) and with a 2GB page file, my resulting image after compression (high) was 935 MB. Then I tried again but this time after removing the page file and deleteing some 90 MB of unused files, and the the new image after high compression was now 815 MB.

Now I tend to think that whether having a page file or not doesn't really affects the final image size as I saved around 100 MB which was more or less the size of files I removed for my new image, excluding the pagefile.sys . I don't recall exactly for my earlier images but all this time I used to think that I was gaining in a smaller size after disabling the page file.


Does anyone happen to have some more information on this?



PS: I put my earlier image of 935 MB on a USB stick (of 1 GB capacity) and I could restore it without any difficulty. However, my USB stick had FAT file system and not FAT32. I guess the FAT file system can also be used.

Incidentally, I couldn't restore the same image from another 1GB USB stick which was freshly formatted in FAT32. Ghost could see the drive but not the image.

Before I tried with the 1 GB USB sticks, I made a smaller partition image and  put it on a 256 MB USB stick which is in FAT32 and the cloning operation (restoring the partition) went fine.

All my USB sticks are of the type USB 2.0 and I don't understand how one 1 GB USB stick which is in FAT32 would not work. Maybe I should format it in FAT?

Any opinions are most welcome...

Thanks a lot in advance

blackeagle wrote on Aug 18^th, 2007 at 7:10am:

My question is whether removing the pagefile before making an image indeed makes the latter smaller.

It really shouldn't make it smaller - if it does, I'd consider that a bug. Leaving the pagefile out of the image is something that goes back to some of the very early versions of Ghost, at least for FAT filesystems, and it's been true of NTFS files for a looong time too.

PAGEFILE.SYS, HIBERFIL.SYS and the like are recognised and treated specially in the image; their directory entries (for NTFS, MFT and attribute data) is kept but Ghost simply omits all the content of those files. When restoring, Ghost puts the directory entries back and then allocates new space for the file to match what it said its size used to be on the old system.

Hi,
   Thanks for the answer. Quoting from you:

"It really shouldn't make it smaller - if it does, I'd consider that a bug"
..."but Ghost simply omits all the content of those files"

If I understand correctly then if I have a page file of around 2 GB, this won't take the 2GB but MUCH MUCH less (with compression) in the image size. Ghost will know that this is special and will allocate its original size back on cloning.

For example in my case even with the 2GB page file, I ended up with an image size of 935 MB for a minimal Windows installation. However, using Ghostexplorer, I'm able to see the original page file size of around 2 GB.

Thanks again.

You've got it, pretty much. Compression doesn't actually factor into it since the data is completely left out.

What you did remind me of though is that Explorer is part of the illusion too. It doesn't show the pagefile as special, and you can even "extract" it, but it's all smoke and mirrors - Explorer just writes out a blank file to fill the space.

Thanks a lot!!! This forum really rocks...