Perhaps it's because I spent my entire Saturday working on presentation charts and I'm too brain dead to do this right, but...

I installed Ghost 2003 on my WinXP Pro SP2 box.  Just to try it out.

When I selected backup, then selected the partition, the first thing I got was a notification box saying that the hardrive wasn't ?registered?  Not sure what that was about, and since I clicked through, I didn't see it again.

Anyway, I figured that I'd make a test backup and put it on my server, which is connected to the windows box via Samba.  Ghost found the directory I'd selected on the network drive, but when I told it to start... BOING... another error.  It didn't know how to connect to the box.  I can only assume that, for some reason, it needs to put the information of how to connect to my network drive in the image.  Don't know why, but I can think of a few reasons.  Anyway, it asked if it could use DHCP, so I said yes.  No joy there, it wanted a protocal, but Samba isn't listed.  I don't know if TCPIP will work.  And that advanced tab?  They weren't kidding about the advanced part.  Gonna take me some time to wade through all that, and I'm not a beginner.

Fine.  Too tired to deal now.  If I have to, I can always keep an image on the second hard drive in that PC.  Of course, that's not going to help me with the 2 laptops I wanted to back up.  I'd figured on being able to use my network, but if Ghost doesn't Samba, that's not gonna happen.  I can only hope that the WD external drive will be acceptable to it.  It's USB2/1.

Finally, I noticed that Ghost had placed an icon in my system tray.  Huh.  I don't like programs that I'm not actually running on purpose to be... well... running.  So I figured I'd right click, then exit.  Except that there appears to be no way to exit.  Out of spite, I used the task manager to kill the thing, but I know it's gonna load back into the tray the next time I reboot.

So... if anyone has any suggestions about how to make ghost work for me, I'd love to hear them.  Don't sweat the external drive stuff, since I know that I have to read that section in the guide before I do anything.  I only skimmed it before. 

I'm really hoping, BTW, that there is a way to boot ghost off a CD *and* restore an image.

Anyway, enough computer stuff for now.

Later!