blackeagle wrote on Aug 22nd, 2007 at 1:01am:Is there any difference between a file named x.gho and y.GHO as far as the file extensions are concerned?
No, none. Due to the way that MS-DOS evolved from CP/M, the original filesystems were all upper-case and later OS's (starting with OS/2 and moving on to NT) added support for not just long filenames but lower-case characters, it was done in a case-insensitive way largely for backward compatibility.
Most such systems implemented this by making the systems "case-retentive" - file names would be stored in whatever form they were first created in, but all operations that required matching the names would perform case-folding. In the case of NTFS this is particularly well designed - one of the hidden metadata files contains the uppercasing table used by the operating system that created the filesystem, so that all software which mounts it perform the case-folding consistently.
Short filenames in FAT filesystems are all upper-case and since Ghost dates from a time when Microsoft's long-filename extensions were quite new and not widely supported, it has always tended to avoid creating long filename entries in FAT filesystems if it can possibly be avoided. The DOS network filesystem redirectors tend to create files with uppercase names on network drives too.
The main point is that virtually nothing will care about the filename case.
Quote:But with Ghost 2003, I get just GHO-extension files like CDR00001.GHO, CDR00002.GHO (for example when burning directy to a DVD). And it works fine. Is it normal not to get GHS files?
This is a specific thing for optical media, because whoever did the initial work for CD writing (initially done I believe for Plextor, who licensed Ghost for a product called CD-ResQ) decided to name things this way. This was I suspect some of the earliest work for images spread across multiple files - even though the entire rest of Ghost was retrofitted for spanning using much better code and produce files with a .GHS extension instead the CD code was left completely alone for backward compatibility.
We take backward compatibility
very seriously. Current Ghost can still restore Ghost images back to at least version 3, which was released over a decade ago.
Quote:PS: By the way, Ghost 2002 complains that it can't read the new file image of Ghost 2003.
And Ghost 2003 doesn't understand all of the extensions of current real Ghost either. Forward compatibility is an entirely different thing to backward compatibility, at least if you want newer versions to have new features.
[ Actually, if you dig really deep in the NT Native API, support for case-sensitive operations is present for alternative operating systems written on top of it. NT was designed to totally support POSIX.1 (including case sensitivity, hard links and all that) and a POSIX subsystem was a supported option for NT for a long time. That said, very few POSIX applications really require case-sensitivity and for as long as I can remember there has been discussion of pathconf() being able to query the filesystem preferences. ]
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