My profound apologies if this question is too basic or posted elsewhere but I just can't seem to find the answer in Rad's great Ghost guide or in an existing forum question.

My objective is to "Radify My New Laptop" and, despite all the guide's advice to prefer Ghost 2003 over Ghost 10, my non-existent DOS skills have persuaded me to go with Ghost 10. OK, so I need to image my "factory" configuration on to the laptop's optical drive before I install anything (including Ghost 10).

I tried booting from my Ghost 10 CD and that will let me recover images but not create them, so that was a dead end. "Plan B" was to try creating a bootable floppy (from my desktop Ghost 10) but there was no Boot Wizard Utility to be found in Ghost 10. "Plan C" was to copy the boot files from Rad's site on to a floppy and then add the ghost.exe. Being a relative computer neophyte, I went looking for "ghost.exe" and couldn't find any such file so I contacted Symantec "Live Chat" yesterday and, 60 mins later, they were completely useless - unwilling or unable to even tell me the answer to such a simple question as where to find a ghost.exe (< 1MB) file! I might be on the wrong track with my "Plan C" anyway if it would require me to try to muddle my way through DOS!

Help would be much appreciated! Is there (1) A way to accomplish imaging my factory configuration in a Windows environment or, if not, (2) In any environment that a neophyte like myself might reasonably accomplish before either (1) throwing the laptop out the window or (2) jumping out myself?

Excellent suggestion, EP. I keep forgetting that pearl.

Adrian,

You won't be able to write directly to DVDs with ghost32.exe from the Recovery Environment. However you may be able to image your C: drive to the C: drive (or to another partition if one is present). I haven't tried imaging to the C: drive with ghost32.exe but it can be done with Ghost 10. Then boot into Windows and burn the image to your DVD. As your computer is program free I'd expect the image to easily fit on one disc. Then delete the image file from your C: drive.

There are other workarounds if ghost32.exe won't write to the C: drive.

adrian,

I just checked and you can't image the C: drive to C: drive with ghost32.exe.

But this does work. Download snapshot.exe (not setup.exe) from here. It's one of my favourite apps and is only around 190 KB. There is a one month trial but this only applies to creating images. It will restore indefinitely. Don't worry about the restore aspect, we can talk you through that if it's ever needed.

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/down.htm

It doesn't need to be installed. It will run from a floppy, USB thumb drive, CD or HD. I suggest copying snapshot .exe to your C: drive and just double click. It's the easiest program to run. In Advanced, make the Maximum image single file size = 4400 MB. Put a tick in Test image after backup. The rest is so straight forward.

Image the C: drive to the C: drive.


PS (Edit)      Make the Maximum image single file size = 2000 MB in case your burning prog has trouble with large files.

Brian, thanks for taking the time to look into and clarify this for me. Much appreciated!

I actually don't have an external HD that I can plug into my laptop at the present and I'd like to get a "clean" image (i.e., before I add my networking software etc), so your suggested Snapshot solution looks like my best best. I'll give this a try and thanks again.

Adrian