I created a vista partition image and on viewing the image in Ghost explorer, i can see the pagefile.sys present and occupying almost 2GB of space in the image.

I thought ghost took care of not copying hibernate and pagefile files while creating the images.

If i delete this file from the image using ghost explorer, would my image still be intact or it goes down the drain??

Every time I've said that I delete the Pagefile before running Ghost, Nigel says I'm wasting my time because ghost won't copy that file.
Just the file name, but NOT the actual file.
Now you're saying that it does.  Hmmmmmmm!

I guess I'll keep on deleting it like I've been doing for years.
You can do it from a Ghost boot disk on an NTFS drive, ONLY, if you first run NTFS4DOS so you can see all the files on the HD from the DOS Prompt.
While you're at it, you could delete several thousand other junk files.

I keep all my drives, except Vista, in FAT-32 mode so I can delete all the junk from Batch Files on my Ghost boot disk, to reduce the size of my Ghost image by about 3 gigs.
On the Vista HD, I use NTFS4DOS followed by my Cleanup batch files.

My own experimenting with Ghost 11 resulted in a Ghost image that when restored, will NOT boot.  I hope your own experience is better.
Let us know.

Good Luck,
The Shadow  8-)

TheShadow wrote on Jul 17^th, 2008 at 5:56pm:

Every time I've said that I delete the Pagefile before running Ghost, Nigel says I'm wasting my time because ghost won't copy that file. Just the file name, but NOT the actual file. Now you're saying that it does.Hmmmmmmm!

TheShadow,

What are the sizes of your backup images if you do delete the page file and if you don't delete the page file? I suspect they will be the same.

TheShadow wrote on Jul 17^th, 2008 at 5:56pm:

My own experimenting with Ghost 11 resulted in a Ghost image that when restored, will NOT boot.I hope your own experience is better. Let us know.

Well i have used 11.0.2 for restoring Vista Business on Dell 640m with 80GB hdd. So far it has worked fine. I had issues with vista using 8.3, which was pointed out later that it had some compatibility issues with vista.
I create a recovery partition on harddisk for quick-recovery just like big OEMs and then keep a special key like f-10 etc to start the recovery process at the boot-up and it automate the whole process.

For Ghost 11, it has worked fine so far with vista but with a severe hit on the speed with which it backs up the data using Fast compression option.
I asked in another thread about the speed issues but no one replied :(.

For backing up almost 14GB of vista data i just get around 200-250MB/min of data speed and it takes almost one hour to create/restore using Ghost 11.

If i use Ghost 8.3 for the same data, it backup at 1000-1200 MB/min. Though i dont restore it using ghost 8.3 as it doesnt make the system bootable.  


Brian wrote on Jul 17^th, 2008 at 6:15pm:

What are the sizes of your backup images if you do delete the page file and if you don't delete the page file? I suspect they will be the same.

Well i played a little more with the images and deleted the file pagefile.sys. It neither didnt increase or decrease the size of the image. But after doing so, i am wondering if my image will restore successfully.

Oh an one more thing i see $Recycle.Bin directory also in the image. It has some 3 folders inside. I am just wondering would ghost be copying whatever was there in my recycle bin also at the time of creating the image ::)?

I'm using Norton Ghost 2003 and it "includes" the pagefile in the image. It's only a "place holder" and when extracted, the size is 0 (zero). Maybe there is some meta data in the "place holder", telling Ghost to recreate a pagefile of e.g. 1.5 GB (or whatever size it was).

Christer

wrote on Jul 18^th, 2008 at 2:16pm:

Well i played a little more with the images and deleted the file pagefile.sys. It neither didnt increase or decrease the size of the image.

Kavitesh Singh,

Thanks for doing that test.

Brian wrote on Jul 18^th, 2008 at 3:56pm:

Thanks for doing that test.

Well, now i am thinking will my image be restored normally or i end up in trouble, after deleting it using ghost explorer.
Another test to be performed now :(

Oh and any pointers to what the sudden speed hit on creating/restoring backups?? Kind of frustrating to wait for an hour for the tasks to complete..

I misunderstood. I thought you created an image, then deleted the pagefile from Windows and created another image.

I don't think you can delete files from an image. You certainly can't with Ghost 9, 10 etc.

Well i deleted the pagefile.sys using the Ghost explorer 11.0.2.. It is just like the file browser we have in windows like the Windows Explorer with right click options containing delete.
So after creating the image, which had pagefile.sys, i deleted using ghost explorer from the image itself.

OK. Sounds like Ghost 11.0.2 is different in this aspect.

All I can say is.....whether you delete the pagefile or not, when you boot up Windows again, it will remake the pagefile on the hard drive to whatever size it's set up to use.  It's all transparent.....you'll never see it.   ;)
So don't get hung up on it....OK?

Apparently, according to Nigel, if you just leave it alone, you'll be just fine.

If you really want to minimize the size of the Ghost backup Image File, clean up the mess on your HD before you run Ghost.
I always run Window's Disk Cleanup, "Easy Cleaner 2" and my own XPCleanup.bat programs before I ever run Ghost.  I also delete all the OLD restore points.
That greatly lessens the amount of data going into my backup file.
If I didn't do that, I'd never be able to get my backup Image File on a single DVD. ;)

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?
The Shadow  8-)