The subject of making a clone of a Vista hard drive has come up on many internet forums.  
I've been involved in several such discussions myself.
Attempts to use the older versions of Ghost, for instance, that will run from a boot floppy or CD have so far failed.

In my own quest for a workable, , solution, I hit upon something that I had not previously considered.

With every Seagate or Maxtor hard drive I've bought in the last couple of years, there was a MaxBlast CD.  
I've always just tossed them in a drawer and forgot about them.

While reading about HD backup solutions on a web site, I was reminded about Maxblast.  
So I dug out one of the newest CD's (Version 5) and loaded it (Installed) into my PC.

One of the options I found was to make a Maxblast Bootable CD, from which I could do disk to disk cloning of any OS or drive format.

I made that boot CD and took it to the computer that I'm using to test Vista Ultimate.  
It has two Maxtor 160gig SATA2 drives. (C: and D: )

I booted the Vista PC with the Maxblast Boot CD and selected to do a disk clone.
As with Ghost and many cloning programs, Maxblast asked me to designate which drive would be the source and which drive would be the Target of the Cloning (Disk Copy) operation.
That was easy and I was quickly in the process of doing a clone from C: to D:.

The most amazing part of this story is that the clone was able to boot my Vista PC with NO problems.  
And, did I mention that Maxblast is ?

Looking around the WWW, I found this site where you can download the Maxblast install program:
http://www.softwarepatch.com/utilities/maxblast-security-dl.html
Your download should start shortly after you get to this site. 

The file to download is:  

It's a 104 megabyte file, so a broadband connection is best for this download.  
Of course it would be easier to just borrow the Maxblast install CD from a friend or local computer shop.

Once installed on your PC, you can use it to make the Maxblast boot CD.

Good Luck and Happy Computing,

The Shadow  

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That's been covered extensively in the Ghost forum. 
The answer is NO!.
Even 11.0 has not worked for me.  I've heard, however that ..11.5 will work, if you can find it.  (I don't have it.)

Cheers!

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I have Ghost 12 and Ghost 14 (both are certified for Vista) and am using Vista.  Ghost 12/14 works like a charm for me.

Are you having problems with Ghost xx.x and Vista or are you having problems with Ghost 12/14 and Vista?

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Ghost 8.3 is a pre-vista version.

Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 is vista-certified.  I don't believe any earlier versions are.

I would be cautious about any earlier versions if you now have Vista.  Why gamble on something so important as a backup?  You want something that WILL work, not something that MIGHT work.

John. wrote on Jul 2^nd, 2008 at 8:50am:

The entire 2.x line is; the initial release of 2.0 was in fact timed to that of the initial release to businesses of Vista in December 2006. Full logo certification was not gained for initial 2.0 simply because of procedural complications in the logo rules - LiveUpdate failed on some trivial aspect of uninstall, and we couldn't get an exemption for that (whereas other Symantec product teams were able to).

And of course, earlier versions do work just fine with Vista, provided you use BCDEDIT to unbind the boot selection from the hard disk's ID.

I've tried Ghost 11.5, both Ghost.exe from a boot disk and Ghost32.exe from a desktop icon and both work just fine for cloning a Vista HD to another HD.

Vista is just SO BIG that making a partition image just isn't all that practical.
Backing up to CD's or even DVD's is likewise NOT practical.
A full HD clone is the most practical method of backing up Vista.

I did the clone first to a HD that already contained an OS and then to a HD that was freshly formatted and in both cases the clone booted up normally.

Ghost 11.5 looks like and runs like Ghost 2003. 
So anyone who's ever used one of those early versions of Ghost will feel right at home with 11.5.


Ghost still ROCKS!

The Shadow 

Pleonasm wrote on Sep 1^st, 2008 at 9:14am:


Agreed!  Perceptions do differ, but, for me I back up so often that I don't want to use up a whole stack of DVD's with each backup.
I currently backup my entire C: drive (Windows XP) to a single DVD or a six gig flash drive.  To do otherwise, would be counter-productive for me.

With Vista, I can no longer use DVD's of Flash Drives, so a spare 160 gig SATA2 drive, an exact duplicate of my C: drive, is my best hope for a complete backup of my OS, data, etc.

It's just a matter of personal preference....you're OK, I'm OK, we're all OK.
There is no right way or wrong way as long as all data is protected.

I've found that the fastest way to do a full drive backup is by using "Ghost32.exe" from a desktop icon.
I just shut down all running programs with "EndItAll2" and then run Ghost32.  It's quick, easy and efficient.

We are Borg....you will be assimilated!