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Ghost 2003 Fingerprinting and CD-R's? (Read 7249 times)
Put_it_in_reverse
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Ghost 2003 Fingerprinting and CD-R's?
Jul 2nd, 2004 at 1:43am
 
I was a Drive Image 2002 (a.k.a. version 6.0) user.  I always did my backups from bootable floppy and program floppy onto alternate partitions or SCSI drives.  When a family member bought a new machine from a major manufacturer, they did not wish to spend the extra money for a SCSI host adapter card.  The manufacturer's warranty will not provide coverage if the drive is repartitioned nor will they provide coverage if I stick one of my old SCSI host adapter cards in the new machine.  I have always found backing up directly to CD-R to be a risky propostion.  Also the new machine is Windows XP SP1 and there was suppossedly some problem with Drive Image 2002 and XP SP1, although I don't know if that problem only occurred if the backup/restores were done while Windows was running.  Bottom line was I needed a new backup/restore program.

I bought Drive Image 7 and boy was that a mistake.  First you cannot backup with a bootable floppy or CD.  You can only restore with a bootable CD.  Second, even with the patches it crashes, stalls, gags, $&!*s.

True Image has similar complaints about crashes.

I found your wonderful forum and based on the dedication and ingenuity of your contributors, I bought Ghost 2003.  Symantec should give you all a stipend for tech support service Smiley

Here are my questions...

1.  I wish to create exact unaltered backups and exact unaltered restores.  I am not going to use the Windows part of Ghost because the Ghost manual says that you have to "mark" all your drives.  I do not want to alter anything.  So I am going to be running from floppies (or bootable CD if I can figure out how to make Sid's boot CD work for me in the future).  But for now, it's floppies only.  When I run Ghost.exe from floppy, it asks if I want to "mark" the drives and I answer no.  HOWEVER, I see something mentioned in the Ghost manual about reading "fingerprint" information that is written to a drive during a restore.  How do I prevent this "fingerprint" information from being written to the drive.  Where is it being written to and during what part of the restore operation?  This "fingerprinting" seems to contradict the notion that a Ghost backup can be used to create a clone drive to be used for forensic analysis.  How do I prevent or erase this fingerprinting?

2.  My backup scheme is to backup split volumes to an external USB 2.0 hard drive and then copy the volumes onto CD-R.  If I start Ghost with A:\> ghost.exe -split=690 I get volumes that will fit onto 700 MB. CD-R's.  But if I use the "generic CD" boot floppy made from the Ghost Wizard, will the program know to ask me to insert the next CD volume, or will it just "bomb"?

3.  If I cannot use the split volumes burned to CD, can someone who regularly burns their backups directly to CD tell me how high is the failure rate for Ghost with backup direct to CD?

Thanks for all your help, people.  I really appreciate it.  Backing up should be easier Smiley
 
 
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Kevbo
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Re: Ghost 2003 Fingerprinting and CD-R's?
Reply #1 - Jul 2nd, 2004 at 3:51am
 
3. I've been burning images for 2 years. About 2 to 6% fail, depending on the CDs, about the same as the rate for defective CDs. LiteOn CD burner.

2. It will ask.

1. I'm not sure, but I know there are special switches to use if you want to make an exact bit-for-bit image. Why don't you want Ghost to mark the drive?
 
 
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Put_it_in_reverse
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Re: Ghost 2003 Fingerprinting and CD-R's?
Reply #2 - Jul 2nd, 2004 at 12:39pm
 
Thanks for the reply Kevbo.

I don't want to mark the drive for a couple of reasons...

Even though I resent the idea of software that requires activation, manufacturers insist on putting that minefield of code into some of their releases.  The code is usually buggy and you never know what is going to set it off thinking that somehow the computer it was on is no longer the same.

Many pieces of software are also vulnerable to "calendar function" triggered problems.  That is to say at any given time a bug can pop up just because "the clock strikes 12."  To me the whole idea of backing up is to reduce downtime to a bare minimum.  If my restore appears in any way different than the condition of the pc when it was backed up, (except for the clock/calendar), yet another degree of unreliability is added.

Backing up is suppossed to increase reliability, so any change (other than clock/calendar), runs contrary to the purpose as far as I'm concerned.

Keeping these things running, espescially XP, is part alchemy.  I would like to make it more cook book like.  I do a backup.  If something blows up later, I do a restore.  I should then hopefully be back where I started.  If the drive is not exactly the same (clock/calendar excepted), I don't know whether some new bizzare problem is calendar related, fingerprint related, hardware related (things do get old and break).  Why pay money for backup software if you aren't going to get back exactly what you backed up to an image.

Warts and all, Drive Image gave you exactly that.  In fact with Drive Image it not only performed a check sum on the image, it also read it back and compared it with the existing data on the hard drive as a final step.  Any deviation and it errored out.  This was why you couldn't use that final verification on an NTFS partition.  To do the image it converted the NTFS data to FAT32.  If you tried to do the verify against the NTFS disk it would bomb.  So NTFS partitions could only be check sum verified.

Any other help deeply appreciated about all the above.  TIA.
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 Fingerprinting and CD-R's?
Reply #3 - Jul 2nd, 2004 at 2:56pm
 
Put_it_in_reverse

Can you put a second hard drive on the machine--or does 'opening the box' void the warranty?  Creating an image to a second hard drive is going to be the fastest option and avoids the concern about CD-R reliability.

Imaging directly to the CD-writer is probably going to be as fast or faster than imaging to a USB 2.0 hard drive if the burner is one of the faster CD burners, and eliminates the extra step of burning the files to the CD after they have been created.  I burn to both CD and DVD media without problems using Plextor CD and DVD writers.  I always run an 'integrity check' after making the image to be sure.

(BTW--I use good quality CD-R's--my most common reliability problems are when using 'free blank CD-R's' that come with some other purchase, or the 100 blank CD-R's for $9.95 with a $9.95 rebate!)

Your questions in item 1:

It's unclear if 'marking' the hard drive and the 'fingerprint' are one and the same thing.  You can find information in the 'User's Guide' here:  

finger switch 158
fingerprint 36, 37, 39, 158

Look here for information about the fingerprint:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/1998111708450325

You might be able to suppress the fingerprinting using this reference:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/8f7dc138830563c888256c2200662ecd/...

Here is the result of doing a 'ghost -finger' at the command prompt:

**********************************************
C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>ghost -finger


Norton Ghost 2003 Copyright (C) 1998-2003 Symantec Corp. All rights reserved.


Disk  Last Norton Ghost Action    Date     Time   Clone-ID
------------------------------------------------------------
 1   File to Partition          04-26-2004  20:46  408d5eb8
 2   File to Partition          05-31-2004  16:56  40b589b7
 1   File to Partition          04-26-2004  20:46  408d5eb8
 2   File to Partition          05-31-2004  16:56  40b589b7
 1   File to Partition          04-26-2004  20:46  408d5eb8
 2   File to Partition          05-31-2004  16:56  40b589b7
 1   File to Partition          04-26-2004  20:46  408d5eb8

*** End of diagnostics ***

C:\WINDOWS\Desktop>
*********************************************

As far as where the fingerprint and/or marking of the hard drive is located, I'm guessing somewhere in the boot sector.  And can you remove it...maybe with a disk editor.  You may be able to get more precise information by posting a question directly to Symantec here:

http://www.symantec.com/techsupp/ghost/ghost_2003_contact_tscs_solve_install.htm...

Quote:
I wish to create exact unaltered backups and exact unaltered restores.


You can find out more here:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/2001111413481325

and here:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/8f7dc138830563c888256c2200662ecd/...

I don't think you will get an 'exact' copy with Ghost, but it can be close.  But, be careful what you ask for...using the '-ir' (image raw) switch will probably create an image size approaching the size of the hard drive!

Also, see here in the 'User's Guide':

skipping files 69

And, also, see here in the 'User's Guide' about using the '-id' switch:

id switch 159

As far as using the CD burner...do some test runs--it will only cost you the price of a few CD-R's and will not harm anything on the computer's hard drive.  It's when you have to do a restore that you have to 'sweat bullets' that you're aiming at the right partition, and the image has to be useable and not corrupted.

BTW, if you booted from you floppy boot disk, and you're burning directly to the CD burner, you will be asked by Ghost if you want to make the CD bootable.  Put whichever of the boot floppies you have made from the 'Ghost Boot Wizard' that you would like this particular CD to boot from into the floppy drive, and Ghost will copy that boot floppy disk to the CD and use it for booting to Ghost from the CD.  And you can use that bootable CD (the first one if it's a multiple CD image set) to boot Ghost in the future, even if you are not going to use the stored image on that particular CD.  And now you can use Ghost for whatever operation you are planning on.  

For instance, I'll boot Ghost using my DVD/CD-ROM drive with a bootable CD made by Ghost using the Standard Ghost Boot Disk floppy disk, and once Ghost is up and running, I then have Ghost write the image to my CD burner, leaving the bootable CD in the DVD/CD-ROM drive.  Now, when Ghost asks if I want to make the CD bootable, I hit yes, and when it asks if the floppy is in the drive (it's not!--Ghost has create a 'virtual floppy A:\ drive when it booted from the CD, and you actually will not have access to the real physical A drive until you reboot), I hit yes and it copies the boot information from the 'virtual floppy' drive to the new CD.  It will be the same boot information as was on the CD you booted from.


 

No question is stupid...but, possibly the answers are  Wink !
(This is an old *NightOwl* user account--not in current use.  Current account is NightOwl without a dash at the end.)
 
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Put_it_in_reverse
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Re: Ghost 2003 Fingerprinting and CD-R's?
Reply #4 - Jul 2nd, 2004 at 4:15pm
 
Thank you NightOwl.  I knew I had come to the right place.

Second drive...  I personally love second drives, and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc. Smiley  (That's why I use SCSI.)  But my family member is afraid of me "voiding the warranty."  They have been "instilled with the fear" of the warranty department Smiley

Officially, the policy is "you gotta buy it from the manufacturer," (at a hefty premium of course).  Suppossedly, (I'm told), if the manufacturer reaps the extra profit of selling you the overpriced addition, then they are willing to take the "risk" that you'll damage the guts during the install.  To be fair, they do make installs of the hardware they sell you fairly straightfoward.  But it still smacks of "tie-in" purchase if you ask me.

I think once the "External Serial IDE" protocol is finalized, life will be simpler for folks like us, although I'll probably use "External Serial SCSI" just to be extra rigorous.  I hope all the manufacturers involved in setting up these standards know enough to build-in DOS functionality so that we can all back up.  If not, someone here is gonna have to write a LINUX-DOS hybrid to make Ghost continue to work with floppies with the new External Serial protocols.

In a strictly technical sense eventually you all want to offload this stuff to CD-R at some point.  No matter how big the "second hard drive" is, it is still finite space.  CD-R is only limited by how often you can clean off the Fuji shelf at Best Buy.  I appreciate your recount of reliable experiences going direct to CD-R.

I am going to try the FPRNT=N in the license file as per your suggestion.  If I summon up enough courage, I'll take a look at the Boot Sector on a Windows 98 machine with an old copy of SystemWorks 2.0 that I have buried somewhere.  If I don't get anywhere with these, I'll try asking Symantec, but generally people don't seem to get very far with Symantec via email.

I like the clever method you use in the last paragraph of your post.  With regard to that method am I better off using the "Standard Ghost Boot Disk" (with the USB 2.0, Firewire, Drive Letter Assignment, etc.)  or the "CD/DVD Startup Disk with Ghost" (which has mscdex.exe, etc.)?

Thanks for all your help, people.  I hope Symantec appreciates you folks.  You all deserve recognition!
 
 
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Re: Ghost 2003 Fingerprinting and CD-R's?
Reply #5 - Jul 2nd, 2004 at 5:06pm
 
Put_it_in_reverse

Quote:
I am going to try the FPRNT=N in the license file as per your suggestion.


Let us know if it works.

It sounds like you have already done an image creation when you say you clicked on 'No' when asked to mark the hard drive.  You may want to try running the 'Ghost -finger' command, to see if it 'fingerprinted' the hard drive anyway.  Some programs do that even though you say 'No'  Angry .

Quote:
I like the clever method you use in the last paragraph of your post.  With regard to that method am I better off using the "Standard Ghost Boot Disk" (with the USB 2.0, Firewire, Drive Letter Assignment, etc.)  or the "CD/DVD Startup Disk with Ghost" (which has mscdex.exe, etc.)?


I have a small partition that only has about 50 MB on it, so I can image it in about 30 seconds, and it will not have to span to additional disks--so I used that to create a bootable CD for all the different boot disks that the wizard can create that I might need, adjusting the settings according to my system's needs in the advanced options area.

So, make them both, or more!  For instance, I do not always need the USB 2.0 support.  That takes a long time to boot and assign the drive letter to the USB drive.  So I have one bootable CD using the 'Std Ghost Boot Disk' with USB support and another without if I'm only imaging to a second hard drive on the system.

(BTW--I think you may have to use the "CD/DVD Startup Disk with Ghost" if you make the image to the USB drive first and then burn to CD-R's rather than letting Ghost burn directly to the CD-R's.  I have not done this--I always have burned direct using Ghost, so I'm not sure, but I think Ghost will not recognize the image if you do your own manual burning as opposed to Ghost doing the job for you, unless you use the "CD/DVD Startup Disk with Ghost" vs the 'Std Ghost Boot Disk'.  Again, you can boot with your bootable CD from one optical drive, and then point Ghost to the other optical drive with your burned image for an integrity check or restoring--if you have two optical drives.)
 

No question is stupid...but, possibly the answers are  Wink !
(This is an old *NightOwl* user account--not in current use.  Current account is NightOwl without a dash at the end.)
 
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