It makes NO difference where you store the image files,,,,,moving and storing them won't change them, but to ever do a restore from them, they first need to be copied back to a hard drive.

Take this scenario for instance:
You have just one HD but its partitioned into two parts.
You make a ghost image and save it to the second part.
Now you copy that image to a DVD for safe keeping.
So far so good.

Later, the hard drive crashes and you have to install an new HD.

FDISK and format the new HD into two partitions, like the old drive.
In DOS, you can copy the files from the DVD back to the second part.
I'd do all this with a boot floppy made on a Windows ME system.
Then boot up again with your Ghost boot disk, locate the old Ghost files and restore them.

I've actually done this so I know it works. 

Where you put those Ghost backup files for safe keeping is up to you and what hardware you have available. 

Good luck and Happy Ghosting,

Shadow 

Thanks for the responses.  Gives me a lot of info to work on.

Stu

The more I mess with Ghost 2003 the more it seems like I shouldn’t mess with it at all—just use it in the simplest way and not push my luck.  For instance:

If I make the “Standard Ghost Boot Disk”, everything seems to work as it should but for a couple of screwy things:  If I wanted to use MS-DOS instead of PC-DOS (Push the “Get MS-DOS” button)  (I don’t really know why I should, so I just take the default) the instructions say “Please ensure that a Win95 or Win-98 system-formatted floppy disk is inserted into the A: drive.  Disks formatted by other operating systems are not supported.”  If I try to continue, I get the message “The version of MSDOS supplied is not suitable for using with Norton Ghost.  Please insert a floppy containing MSDOS from either Win95 or Win98”.  So, I guess whatever version of MSDOS that is in Windows XP is not  suitable—maybe because of the NTDS file system?  So if I put an old copy of MSDOS on the floppy, why would I want to “Get MS_DOS”?  And if I had it, what would I do with it”.  All this seems to make Ghost too complicated.  I went ahead and created the boot floppy and then transferred it to a bootable CD and it worked OK.  Except that:---

The verification program only recognized one of my CD/DVD drives.  All my other software recognizes both of them.  All I need is one recognized, but why doesn’t it recognize both?  I haven’t tried to make backups with both drives yet—don’t know whether that will make it recognize both, but I doubt it.  Messing around with various kinds of backups and experiments takes a lot of time!!!  Also, as before, it wouldn’t verify a file on DVD because “it was not created with Ghost”.

So, then, what I tried to  do is  use the “CD/DVD Startup Disk With Ghost”  method.  The implication here is that it will create a CD or DVD disk for use with backups which were not made using DVD’s—in other words,  a backup file which was transferred  from HDD to DVD.  It doesn’t create a CD or DVD.  It creates two floppies instead.  I tried transferring them to a bootable CD as in the “Standard Ghost Boot Disk” approach and it would not work at all.  Probably because each floppy has it’s own Autoexec.bat file, or whatever.  Anyway, I tried booting up with the two floppies and after showing more errors of the “can’t find” variety than I care to list it finally came up with the DOS screen.  But with this method it didn’t recognize either one of the CD/DVD drives.  So much for that method.

I guess Ghost 2003 was created before NTDS and CD/DVD’s were in common use.  And, of course, unless you specify a floppy drive you don’t even get one with your computer these days, so that doesn't help matters.  I haven’t had good luck with Acronis at all—too many bugs.  Maybe I would be better off if I went to Ghost 12, although folks in the Ghost 12 forum don't seem all that happy.

I would appreciate any comments you might have regarding the above experiences and also your opinions of Ghost 12.

Stu Culp

Thanks, Ben,

I hate to sound lame, but is the exe file to be opened in Windows and the contents transferred to a floppy or is it to be opened in a floppy?

Stu