Ghosting Vista.

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Soldato
Joined
5 Jul 2003
Posts
16,206
Location
Atlanta, USA
Hi.
Does anyone know if its possible to ghost Vista?
I remember a problem a while back i had at work, i tryed ghosting my Vista laptop, errored, and then when it got into windows it started complaining about authentication again?

Im waiting for some new PC parts to come through the post, and what i want to do is install Vista, the drivers, all my essential apps, then ghost it to a HDD for quick restoral.

Ideas?

Thanks in advance all. :).
 
I've succesfully used acronis on vista.

Are you using the hard disk encryption with vista?
 
I've used Symantec Ghost which works fine. DOS version.

I noticed with Windows Backup (which works great) it requires re-activation which I think is absolutely stupid.

With Ghost you activate it and it works fine when re-imaged.



M.
 
vista has a backup option that can 'ghost' itself, works rather well, i'd use that before ghost anyday

don't bother with norton ghost, the 2003 floppy version was the only one that worked well tbh

much better off buying acronis true image home, no faffing it just works everytime
 
bledd. said:
vista has a backup option that can 'ghost' itself, works rather well, i'd use that before ghost anyday

don't bother with norton ghost, the 2003 floppy version was the only one that worked well tbh

much better off buying acronis true image home, no faffing it just works everytime
Click to expand...

As in my original post if you use Windows Backup to 'image' it then you will have to activate it when you restore.

I believe this is, basically, because the image can be used to deploy to many PC's because the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is different so, unlike Windows XP, you can deploy the image to a PC with a completley different hardware structure.

The version of Ghost I use (I don't just use one because our customers have different versions) are 7 and 8.



M.
 
beano said:
It works!!! :eek: :D

Did i read somewhere that you have to re-authenticate it every time you do a fresh install?

I'll look into Acronis, cheers for that bledd. ;)
Click to expand...

Didnt realise vista had a built in complete system backup facility.
Just ran it myself and created a image on my external drive incase it ever goes down in the future.
Really easy to use. another useful vista feature :)
 
m4cc45 said:
As in my original post if you use Windows Backup to 'image' it then you will have to activate it when you restore.

I believe this is, basically, because the image can be used to deploy to many PC's because the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is different so, unlike Windows XP, you can deploy the image to a PC with a completley different hardware structure.

The version of Ghost I use (I don't just use one because our customers have different versions) are 7 and 8.



M.
Click to expand...
ahh

didn't realise it sysprep'd it too, only used it once during vista RC stage :)
 
It doesn't quite SysPrep it (i.e. when you image your PC it will be at that state you don't get ot enter a new name, enter a new cd-key, etc) it just re-activates the activation (which is annoying really) where-as ghost is an EXACT image of the PC, doesn't require re-activation, etc.

It is a really good facility though. Very quick as well. I did have one problem when I backed up to DVD and it told me that my hard-drive wasn't big enough to recover (as I had changed it to, funnily enough, a bigger one) but this is a well known bug and is probably fixed by now (it was when Vista was first out).

Well worth a look though.



M.
 
Just out of curiosity, if my drive is partitioned and i use the C drive for windows, and D drive for programs, am i likely to have difficulties when i try to recover the C drive? I can see that i'll have problems with programs i've added after the backup, but what about programs installed pre-backup!?!
 
Anything installed prior to imaging will be working. Imaging a drive is bascially taking a photograph of your data.
 
Thats only if you backup the entirity of your PC.

I don't want to treat anyone as if they're stupid but you'd be suprised at the amount of people who say that I have backed up My Documents and can't restore the entire PC.




M.
 
Symantec say Ghost does not support vista and say people should move to "norton backup & restore 2.0" which i've used and its quite good actually. its got a few more features than ghost but is missing 2 (iirc) features (which as i recall are both business-esc ones that home users dont need)

TrueImage was a complete failure for me.

having said all that ive ended up back on XP using ghost :P

11minutes.. and my computer is back to whatever day @ 5am :) just so easy.
 
I only use the DOS disks and create an image of the hard-drive as a master image rather than a daily backup.

As far as I am aware pretty much every version of Ghost supports Vista as it uses NTFS - it doesn't really know the Operating System as it just makes an image.



M.
 
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