I exclusively use the DOS-based Ghost products since they are easy to use, don't need installation, are fairly fast writing to hard drives, and work with any FAT/NTFS/SATA/IDE system I've tried.

I understand that the above versions (2003, 8.x, 11.x) are all based on the same design. So as far as the DOS-based part of these Ghost products, what is the difference between the versions? I've never had any issues with 2003, so I wonder what the other versions add to the DOS-based product.  :-?

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1144041767/0#0 ::)

klerch wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 1:26pm:

I understand that the above versions (2003, 8.x, 11.x) are all based on the same design.

They are the same code, yes, all made by the same product team - well, same in the sense of the proverbial woodsman's favourite axe - in New Zealand who made original the original Ghost product in the 1990s.

What is sold as the "Norton Ghost" consumer product nowadays is not Ghost, nor made by that team. It is a completely unrelated product based on one made by PowerQuest in Utah before they were acquired by Symantec.

Genuine Ghost is sold and supported (and continuing to be developed) as part of Ghost Solution Suite.


klerch wrote on Aug 1^st, 2008 at 1:26pm:

what is the difference between the versions?

The kinds of things you'd expect from 5 years of development, basically.

Nowadays you can edit NTFS partitions with Ghost Explorer, you can leave files intact on a system you are restoring Ghost to, we continue to expand our support for ext3 and Linux, you can image hot from within Windows XP and above (and Linux, with LVM, using the native Linux version), you can image to and from VMWare virtual disk files as well as .GHO images, the virtual partition system supports larger virtual partitions able to run Windows PE (and we have tools for making your own one-click virtual partitions), Ghost now supports drives and filesystems larger than 2Tb, .... and a whole lot of other stuff.

If Ghost 2003 still works for you, then remember, it's the only one of the versions you mentioned that will run from a single 1.44meg Floppy disk.
Versions 8.x and 11.x are too big to fit on a single floppy, with the DOS operating system.

I still use Ghost 2003 from a floppy disk, because that's the only way I know of to make a Ghost Backup DVD and make it bootable, all in one operation.

Cheers Mate!
The Shadow  8-)

Thanks for the useful replies. Were there any speed increases between the versions? My understanding is the DOS version was hampered by DOS speed limitations.

My biggest problem with the product is that writing to media is very slow, much slower than the 4x, 8x, 12x, etc drive capability. Otherwise, 2003 is my all around can opener.

klerch wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 7:00am:

Were there any speed increases between the versions?

That's complex. Under ideal conditions when Ghost 2003 could use its own built-in IDE drivers, it often could run nearly as fast as the disks could handle, unless taking an image when the source disk was very heavily fragmented (because Ghost writes files to image contiguously, it would effectively combine the image with a defragment, making it sometimes slower than the naive PowerQuest imaging tools).

However, a lot of modern SATA hardware forces genuine Ghost in DOS to run through the BIOS at a much lower rate because it cannot employ any asynchronous I/O without its own drivers and on such platforms running it under Windows PE can increase the speed (especially for network clones) quite a bit. Whether or not this makes any difference depends on your situation. It might not speed up at all, or it could do quite a bit, or it might even (thanks to the boot time of Windows PE) get slower. It's not something that's really possible to say definitively.

And in addition, the DOS-based CD/DVD burning code has not really sped up much to my knowledge. Doing so would involve writing a lot of very complex, hard-to-test code to probe drive and media capabilities that is honestly of no real importance to the corporate customer base we sell to now.

Given that the ex-PowerQuest tools can also take images which are small differential files containing only changed sectors, it's for most users better overall as a consumer backup product than genuine Ghost ever really was (whereas Ghost is and always has been better for deployment and manufacturing). For things like hard drive transplants it's really a matter of preference.

I understand what you are saying, in fact writing to hard drives is very fast. But it seems writing to CDs/DVDs is stuck at 1x (or something like it).

I realize in DOS it would be cumbersome to know the drive capabilities. But considering any drive you buy nowadays can do at least 32x, it may make sense to have an option to choose the ghost writing speed - allow the user to match with what the user knows the writer's capability to be.

As hard drives get larger, the time involved in writing to DVDs at 1x (hours) make writing direct to DVDs less and less feasable.

klerch wrote on Aug 4^th, 2008 at 12:08pm:

, it may make sense to have an option to choose the ghost writing speed

Given the resources we have for development, and the far more important things our corporate customers are asking of us, it doesn't make sense.

Now, we would like to improve the CD/DVD writing in Windows one day - and in particular support higher-capacity media like BD-R, which would work faster as well - but the kind of code changes we'd need to make for that to happen wouldn't be ones that we could possibly port to DOS. That environment is simply too restricted - as it is, the existing Ghost CD/DVD code has to do all kinds of ugly things to deal with e.g. buffer underruns that are non-issues on any sane OS platform, and indeed the complexities of managing buffer underrun in a non-multicasting OS are so severe that I doubt that Ghost would really be able to go much faster than it does at present.

I totally buy the fact that there are more important things people are asking for. But I think if the feature is there to write to DVDs, it should run at a reasonable speed - otherwise, why do it?

It could get to the point where you try to backup a 1TB HD and Ghost could laugh at you  ;D "You wanna do what? Grab a pillow!"

Seriously though, maybe something before the process starts that tells you just how long the DVD write will take could be useful too.

I suspect you're right about the 1x writing speed.
But if you want to get the basic backup over and done with in the least amount of time, set the spanned file size to about 4 gigs and make the backup to a separate partition on your HD or to a second (even external) hard drive, then later at your convenience use a burning program like NERO to burn the spanned images to DVD's at whatever speed your burner and disks can handle.  That will give you a safe way to put your backup in a fireproof vault as a hedge against disaster.

Yes, as our HD's get bigger and bigger, the old Ghost backup takes longer and longer.  That's why I go to extremes to keep my C: drive as small as possible so I can still get it compressed onto a single DVD.

I've used all three versions of Ghost mentioned above and I've gone back to the 2003 version because it seems to run just as fast as any and will run from a DOS Boot Floppy......the other two are too big to fit on a floppy disk. (but, they run just fine from a boot CD or Flash Drive)

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  8-)

Your suggestion to go the the HD first and then DVD makes sense, but is there some protocol I have to follow to do this? Is there a media naming convention or other potential confusion for Ghost if I do it this way? Or will ghost find the pieces to put back together regardless of the disc name or media type?

Are there any incompatibilities between these Ghost versions? For example, if I make an image in 2003, can I restore it with 11, or vice versey?

Later versions of Ghost can restore all previous versions back to about Ghost 3.0 (from over 12 years ago).

However, every new version of Ghost tends to need to add new features to the GHO file format, and so you can basically never use an older version of Ghost to restore an image taken with a newer version.

The same sort-of applies to using newer versions of Explorer; for instance, you can try and edit a Ghost 2003 image with Ghost 11.x Explorer, and it will appear to let you edit the NTFS partition. However, it's modifying the image in ways that Ghost 2003 doesn't understand, and at best it will simply ignore the edits, and at worst will fail to restore.

Basically, it's best not to try and mix and match, and always have the latest version to restore (which you'd want anyway, since the newest versions always have more bugs fixed than the older ones).

At least I can be sure that upgrading to 11.x (for example) will still allow me to use all my previous images. Thanx.

I keep saying this and I guess no one's paying attention or doesn't understand what I'm saying (US English spoken here).

"Ghost Knows"!!!  
NO, you can't take ghost images off of a hard drive, put them on DVD's and expect Ghost to restore them from the DVD's.
If you store Ghost Image files on DVD's for SAFE keeping, you must copy them back to their original location before using them to do a "Restore".
SO, if they were originally made to a second partition on your main HD, and the HD dies, you must partition a new HD just like the original disk and copy the Image files back to that second partition.  Then Ghost will restore them to the first partition.  
If it was a Partition to Image backup, then when you restore that Image to a new HD, you'll have to take steps to rebuild your boot sector on the HD.  Only a "Disk to Image" backup will restore without booting problems.

So, there are a few caveats to think about before you decide on your final backup plan.  Make your plan, verify that the plan is sound and works, and then work your plan and don't deviate from it.
Write it down on paper if you have to, so you don't miss any important step.  This can be very important, if you don't do this stuff every day.

This simple rule has served me well, oh these many years.

Good Luck,
The Shadow   8-)

TheShadow wrote on Aug 12^th, 2008 at 8:28am:

I keep saying this and I guess no one's paying attention or doesn't understand what I'm saying (US English spoken here).

No, we understand perfectly.


TheShadow wrote on Aug 12^th, 2008 at 8:28am:

NO, you can't take ghost images off of a hard drive, put them on DVD's and expect Ghost to restore them from the DVD's

This has always been possible, it simply required planning to do because of the limitations of ISO9660 filesystems in DOS when accessed through MSCSDEX (so, the base image and the spans had to have sensible 8.3 names).

Similar considerations apply to moving images; you can move them, but you need to ensure that the 8.3 names of the files are kept if you're working with a DOS-based version of Ghost.

In later current versions, this limitation is less important; every version we do does more to remove dependencies on this historical 8.3 limitation of DOS, especially when using Windows PE as the restore environment.

Hi TheShadow

I agree with Nigel regarding the restoration. Maybe because my experience is only based on Ghost 8.3 or 11.

So far i can say on the moving of ghost images across harddisk and restoring. I have not tried DVD options.

I create a backup in my hdd by creating a backup folder in D/E drive (backing C drive). I give the name normally CImage. Let ghost add number extensions when i give the split option of 700 or 4GB.

I have tried moving it across HDDs(external USB hdd) and restore it from them. It works fine.


wrote on Aug 12^th, 2008 at 4:13pm:

Similar considerations apply to moving images; you can move them, but you need to ensure that the 8.3 names of the files are kept if you're working with a DOS-based version of Ghost.

I think Nigel has said it right. I didn't fiddle around with the names. Just kept the same what the ghost created.

Maybe will try it with DVDs and update you.

I was specifically referring to making images to a hard drive and then moving them (burning them with Nero, etc.) to DVD's and expecting Ghost to ask for the second, third, etc., DVD to effect the restore.
Did I fail (again) to make myself clear?  Evidently!

English spoken here!

The 8.3 filename thingy really has nothing to do with what I was trying to say!

Sorry!
Shadow  8-)

TheShadow wrote on Aug 18^th, 2008 at 5:43pm:

I was specifically referring to making images to a hard drive and then moving them (burning them with Nero, etc.) to DVD's and expecting Ghost to ask for the second, third, etc., DVD to effect the restore.

That's exactly what I said works, and it does work, and it always has worked. I've done it plenty of times, doing this has been part of Ghost's design since about v3.0 when Plextor licensed it for their CD-ResQ product (or maybe they licensed 4.0, I forget) and the only real caveats are that a) you have to not be an idiot and use ISO9660 and not UDF so that MSCDEX can mount the disk, and b) if the 8.3 filenames aren't quite how Ghost wants during the restore it'll prompt at every span instead of only the end of the disk.

There is no file format difference between CD and Hard disk images with the sole exception that when writing directly to a CD, the spans Ghost writes are missing the normal file signature at the start of a hard disk span - and there's a single bit in the initial .GHO that says it did that instead of writing the normal hard-disk span format. That is the sole file-format difference between the two, and all that the CD bit does is turn off a check for that leading header, nothing else. Ghost is otherwise completely happy to restore whatever content it is given.