Brian wrote on Jul 24^th, 2008 at 11:57pm:

I can delete stuff.

What would you consider safe for a 30-gig drive?

I'm not entirely clear whether we're talking genuine Ghost or V2i now, but I don't recall any known problems at all with filesystems with high load factors in genuine Ghost. In principle all it needs is a small amount of room to deal with rearranging things to fit the new partition, but I've honestly not done much testing at high load factors to know if there are any issues left that haven't been cleaned up over recent years.

Brian wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 1:58am:

Okay, got it down to 25 gigs, or 84% by my calcs.

Nigel, I d/l'ed G32.exe, but not sure how to package it. I have no floppy right now, long story. But I *used* to have a USB floppy.

I believe Nero will make a bootable CD for me which I can load G32 onto, but not sure if that will work.

What do you recommend?

Or does someone have a ready-made group of bootable files I can d/l?

I'm not sure about the environment G32 must boot to in order to run, or does it execute from Windows? (I use WXP.)

It worked!

I'm back with new 160-GB Western Digital drive. Here's what I did:

C: 40 GB Primary Active NTFS (old drive was 30 GB)
_: 20 GB Primary Linux Ext3 (no swap created, was worried about using too many primary partitions)
D: 25 GB Logical Extended NTFS (old drive was 7 GB)
F: 65 GB Logical Extended NTFS (old drive was 20 GB)

My Partition Magic boot CD gave me problems:

Quote:

Hitting Okay takes me to A:\>

If I booted with the new hard disk drive in system with NO boot CD, I got following message:

Quote:

So I just partitioned with trusty 'ol FDISK, since I can use that in my sleep.

At first, my Ghost 12 Recovery CD wouldn't boot and I started sweating bullets:

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But after ctrl-Alt-Del, Ghost 12 loaded normally.

Then, after the reboot, and I saw the Windows XP screen load, I was stoked! I was actually on the phone to my cell phone company, upping my monthly minutes, when it booted. (Been talking a lot lately.)

Definitely considerably faster. No doubt about it. The old drive was a Hitachi Travelstar, if anybody cares. I think Hitachi bought IBM's disk drive deivison a few years back.

Is there a way to be able to "ALT-TAB" (so to speak) back and forth between Windows and Linux? (with having to reboot)\\

Is that what virtualization lets you do? Or am I dreaming?

One last thing: Ghost 12 automatically expanded my image taken from a 30-gig drive .. to fill the FULL SIZE of the 40-gig partition onto which it was restored.

Also, I ticked off the following during restore:

* Verify recovery point before restore
* check for file system errors after recovery
* Set drive active (for booting O/S)
* Restore original disk signature
* Restore MBR

Basically, that means I checked EVERYTHING that could be checked.

Rad wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 5:19pm:

That's precisely what virtualization does. Run other "guest" OS's in a normal window on whatever host OS you use. Pretty much the only combination that is hard to do is MacOSX as a guest since it wants to run only on Apple hardware.

The only drawback is that - for effectively full virtualization a la VMWare - they all still need to fit into your actual physical memory, and because the virtual hardware can't dynamically tell the guest OS about memory coming and going, you need to statically decide how much memory to allocate to the virtual hardware each "guest" OS runs in.

[ This is why there are several completely different virtualization systems in Solaris; there are higher-level software virtualizers that work on the UNIX user process level, *and* ones that work at a lower level in the OS, *and* full OS hardware virtualization. The higher-level virtualizers can do more fancy things, and don't need static resource partitioning like the hardware ones do. ]

So, with ~2Gb (or more) of memory you can run quite a few machines, and they can make good use of multiple cores. It's fun seeing how many levels you can stack up, too, and you can *really* get a good hall of mirrors going if you have more machines and remote desktop/VNC.

Rad wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 2:44pm:

It's easiest to run it from a USB device (memory stick or hard drive) with the Windows PE environments from Norton Ghost 12 or Partition Magic.

As I said via e-mail, since I didn't have time to upload the full GSS2.5 install set, I could have prepared and uploaded you a WinPE2 boot CD with it (the Boot Wizard makes that, and creating bootable USB memory sticks, pretty easy) but I figured you could use those other environments in the meantime. If you want to run more experiments I can still do that, it's just going to be slow given the upload cap on my residential DSL until I get back to work on Monday.

At least, that's assuming that the power stays on. http://www.stuff.co.nz/4631448a11.html

That is pretty cool. Are those installs running nested in another OS, such as Windows? Or are they .. I forget the word, but it means running directly off the hardware, and not floating in another OS .. maybe type 1 or type 2 hypervisor.

Quote:
u suk.  

Files are copying back onto new hard drive now .. going much faster than the other way (to USB hard drive) .. but still taking a while.

Next time I back-up a whole drive to external usb drive, i am going to use Ghost, cuz it seems to go much faster than regular ol' Windows file copy ala explorer. little files take forever. big files go reasonably fast. I mean non-sysem drives.

I have 2G RAM now. How much does Linux need? I want WXP + Ubuntu. I already partitioned off 20 gigs Ext3 for Linux. Will I use that?