Using Ghost 2003, I've begun getting a message that stops the creation of the drive image until I respond.

"Actual file size is less than reported size, ignore?"  What's up with that?

I choose to ignore and the imaging process finishes.  The integrity check passes.

Since the image is passing the integrity check, all is well.  But, since the message stops the imaging, I have to sit and wait for it to pop up...something I haven't had to do in all the years I've been using Ghost 2003.

Also, just prior to the message, in what I'm going to call an information bar at the very bottom of the Ghost DOS GUI, is a phrase that reads, "Warning: Next cluster not eof".  I'm guessing eof means, end of file.

Things I do prior to imaging:

I whittle my primary drive size down by dumping the recycle bin and check to see if there's any applications I can uninstall since I'm right a the limit of fitting everything onto a single 4.7 GB DVD.  (I haven't studied how I might span bootable DVDs when writing them with Nero.  Spanning DVDs within Ghost doesn't work on my machine.  My best memory is Ghost doesn't like my NEC 3520 DVD writer.)

The last thing I do is defrag the drive with Norton Speed Disk.

Am using a boot floppy and running Ghost from DOS

Am using highest compression so I can fit the image onto a single Bootable DVD.

-Joe

I appreciate the reply, Nigel.  I'll follow up by reporting the fix, hopefully.
No more defragging before imaging for me.  That's a time saver!

-Joe

The follow-up:

Well, somehow the problem was fixed.  Ghost imaged without a hitch.

I kind of had to go online for some CHKDSK schooling.

From a cmd prompt, I ran "chkdsk c: /f /r" without the quotes...both options at the same time, fix and recover.  That scheduled a disk check on the next restart.

I wish I knew what occurred:  a bad spot on the drive, a corrupted file due to a bad shutdown or a restart when the power blinked during a thunderstorm.

But, I couldn't see indication of the problem or what was fixed in the Winlogon file found in Administrative Tools > Event Viewer >Application.

Thanks again, Nigel, for your good help.

-Joe

Rad wrote on Jul 1^st, 2008 at 12:09am:

To a tiny degree, but then you have to bear in mind that the defrag process itself has to do VASTLY more work. At a minimum, it has to do all the same jumping around that Ghost would do, so logically it can't possibly save time overall unless you were planning to do one anyway, and since to reorganize things it introduces a full read and write cycle on all the data being moved, and a truly enormous amount of head movement in that process, in reality it's not helpful at all to the imaging process for classic Ghost.

It's a reasonable thing to defrag occasionally, of course, and if you're used to doing it around the same time as imaging for process reasons there's no reason to stop. The point is that Ghost itself doesn't care whether you do that or not and there's no need to defrag solely for its sake and never has been.

It's one of those things like deleting the pagefile that a bunch of folks do, but that's because they've never actually tried a controlled test and noticed that the pagefile makes no difference to the size of the image (they just see it in Explorer and assume it must be taking up space even though it never, ever has).