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Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY. (Read 142394 times)

Pleonasm

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	Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY. Reply #60 - Jan 10^th, 2008 at 3:57pm Cardinal23, please see this thread for a discussion of ShadowProtect Desktop. Personally, I have switched to ShadowProtect Desktop myself, and no longer use Norton Ghost.
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friendly_jacek

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Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY.
Reply #61 - Jan 28^th, 2008 at 11:02am

Sorry to revive this old thread, but a have a similar but slightly different question.

First, let me explain that I used Ghost 2003 since 2004 to backup up to 6 PCs at my home (i'm beginning to get tired of this home administrator job). I came handy a few times when kids messed up their PCs or I wanted to replace drives for bigger ones.

I assumed that my documents would be safe even if the system died completely as I would recover the drive contents from ghost image and read the drive contents from within another system. I used to do that in Win95/98 environment. Now, after reading this thread (all 5 pages), it occurred to me that it may be impossible within XP as the user documents/data is password protected and the outside access would be blocked. I guess I need to test it more and research the Ghost and XP Recover Install to new hardware route.

Did anyone try accessing user documents from restored drive in another XP system?

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kd6aaj

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Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY.
Reply #62 - Jan 29^th, 2008 at 4:47pm

If you aren't worried about others reading your documents, you could put them in a shared folder right before you save a ghost image.

Just a thought. I think you could read any user files with ghost explorer if you are a super user/administrator.

Maybe I'll try sometime.

Which OS you using, Win2k, XP Pro or Home? Just curious.

I like to deliberately test stuff like this.

Ed, kd6aaj

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Nigel Bree

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Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY.
Reply #63 - Jan 29^th, 2008 at 6:29pm

kd6aaj wrote on Jan 29^th, 2008 at 4:47pm:

I think you could read any user files with ghost explorer if you are a super user/administrator.

Just as a general Windows thing, Administrators can take ownership of whatever they like and reset their ACLs with abandon, so documents are always readable in Windows.

You can read any files in an image with Ghost Explorer, full stop. ACLs on files in images aren't respected - there's no real way to correlate the security context outside with the security context inside the image to make them meaningful, and you can only get an image by having administrative powers in the first place.

Where things get difficult is with EFS-encrypted files - those are a different deal. Getting access to them - even for simple operations like putting them on USB keys and move them between machines - is hard without doing all kinds of stuff, and inside images the same protection works because it's impossible to get the encryption keys.

So the question is what did the original poster mean by "password protected" - which is hard to guess. Did he mean just normal windows ACLs and separate user accounts, or did he mean EFS encryption? If the former, it's fine - if the latter, recovery is by design much harder.

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friendly_jacek

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	Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY. Reply #64 - Jan 30^th, 2008 at 4:52pm Thanks for the replies. I didn't think of Ghost Explorer as I never used it before. I need to learn this. BTW, by password protection, I meant the user passwords on the XP home welcome screen. However, an user with admin privileges can restrict access to documents from other users (also admins).
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Leo

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Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY.
Reply #65 - Feb 15^th, 2008 at 7:15am

I have been using Ghost 8.2 for about 4 years now in an environment with 1500 computers. Because I work with the government we do not know what kind of computers we will get in the next shipment (lowest bidder) so we create a "gold" image and when the new computer comes in be it a DELL, IBM or HP we load our image and then use the OEM disk that come with the new pc to load any new drivers ie sound, video or nick card. the only "problem" is that the new drive has to be either the same size and the one we imaged or larger.

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NightOwl

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Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY.
Reply #66 - Feb 15^th, 2008 at 9:30am

Leo

Are you using command line switches to over-ride Ghost's default behavior?

Usually, Ghost will allow an image to be placed on a larger, same, or smaller HDD as long as the data fits--unless you over-ride Ghost's image creation process and force it to do an *image all* or *sector-by-sector* image creation that includes all the *unused space* as well as the data on the source HDD!

That would force Ghost to restore to only the same or larger sized HDD.

Perhaps the process of creating your *gold* image forces that result????

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Pleonasm

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Re: Ghost image and STOLEN computer - please CLARIFY.
Reply #67 - Mar 17^th, 2008 at 12:55pm

A case study in performing a hardware independent restore…

Quote:

The miracle-working utility was StorageCraft's ShadowProtect Desktop, a drive-imaging program that backs up your system by making an "image" of your hard disk in a single file that you can store anywhere, and then restore to your system in case of disaster. One of this program's unique features is Hardware-Independent Restore, which means you can take a backed-up image of a Windows system that uses one kind of hard disk controller and restore it to a new computer that uses a completely different hard disk controller. I wanted to use this feature to transfer my highly-customized Windows XP system from an older machine that uses an ATAPI hard disk to a shiny new system using a SATA hard disk in the high-performance AHCI mode.

I knew from experience that you can't add the AHCI drivers to an existing Windows XP system--they have to be added during initial installation. StorageCraft said that its Hardware-Independent Restore could do the impossible: It could take an image of my old ATAPI-based system, inject the AHCI drivers needed for my new system, and copy the altered system to my new machine. The company was right.

I booted from ShadowProtect's emergency-boot CD, fired up the Hardware-Independent Restore option, and got my old system up and running again on my new machine in less than an hour. I had to install the new motherboard's network, sound, and a few other drivers, but for the first time, I didn't have to reinstall all my software and customize the system. ShadowProtect Desktop saved me days of work installing and customizing a dozen applications.

Source: ShadowProtect Desktop and Roxio BackOnTrack: One's Killer, One's Deadly

ple • o • nasm n. “The use of more words than are required to express an idea”

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