New hard drive with Norton Ghost

Replacing an old 6.4 gig with a 13 gig. Have win98. With old hd imaged to cds can you just pull out the old hd and put in new formatted hd and reload image from cds? It's Ghost from Systemworks Pro 2003. Thanks a lot.

 

Don't get complicated Christer.
The ghost image on the CD, is totally complete, right down to the bootstrap sectors and FAT tables.

Start the computer with the Ghost diskette.
Select Local, Disk, From Image.
Select the source (the CD-ROM drive) and destination (your new 13 gig) and let it run.
When complete, restart the computer, and voila.
It's that simple.

 

So Reboot, I make the Ghost copy of the old 6.4 hd. Then shut 'er down, and remove the old hd and put in the new 13 hd. Then boot up with the first cd of the Ghost image cds and away we go? Will there be any problem of the difference between the space of the 6.4 and the 13, or will that just be empty space like about 2 gigs of my 6.4 is currently? Thanks for your time all of you. JAK

 

Christer, we're both right.
A cloned ghosted HD, is a byte by byte copy.
An image is a file by file copy.
Who cares?
End result is exactly the same. I have never run into a problem with a tested image.
The single largest problem people have with restoring an image, is not getting a boot sector write, thus the newly restored hard drive must be "repaired" in order to boot...that is writing the boot sector to the hard drive, either through a "sys c: ", or repair install.
If your ghost image is bootable, then the finished hard drive will be bootable, but most people don't make the image bootable, because they don't read instructions. http://ghost.radified.com has full instructions.

JAK, you have email. (reposted here for info)
Two ways you can do it.
1.) Make the image, swap drives, restore the image.
2.) Mount both drives, ghost, remove old drive, put new in it's place.
#2 is easier, and faster, but then you wont' have a backup on disk of your drive.

The difference in size is irrelevant. The new drive will simply contain more unused space, formatted, and ready to use.
No extra partitions or anything.

 

You're correct.
The image is complete, wether it's bootable or not, however!...here's the problem...
Depending on which version of Ghost you have, and if you're using the same version to RESTORE the image as you did to MAKE the image, if it's going to work or not. This is where a repair of the boot sector may be needed...

Ghost writes a disk as if it were new, unpartitioned, unformatted, inactive, nonfdisked etc...it just doesn't care. It extracts the image, and writes it to the hard drive, starting at track 0, head 0, sector 0. Any extraneous size left over is simply formatted.

It makes no difference if you're cloning a disk, or restoring an image (backup). The end result is EXACTLY the same as the original hard drive, including the serial number etc. It is a true CLONE.

Imaging is done file by file, because it's faster, and (at the base level byte by byte) is more accurate. If you want to try a test, start with a badly fragmented hard drive, create an image, then restore it. You'll find that the hard drive is no longer (as badly) fragmented. This is the "file by file" system at it's finest. You'll also notice that the swap file is NOT included in the image (THANKYOU NORTON GHOST!!!) as it used to be in older versions.
Ghosting a drive to drive results in the same fragmentation of the end result, because it's done like the old DOS "discopy" command, byte by byte, including blank space, fragmented files, the swap file etc.

Now that you know how ghost does the difference between byte and file, it still doesn't really matter, because the end result is exactly what you wanted.
Ghost simply works, better (and faster) than any other software of this type.

 

The difference between unformatted space (brand new or 0's written by a utility), and formatted space (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, or any other type), is what the FAT registers. During the clone/image process, ghost determines the size of the new drive, and simply adjusts the contents of the FAT to compensate, either up or down. Very smart software
Currently (AFAIK), Ghost only supports microsoft file systems, however, at work we have a version of Ghost that also reads/writes/clones/images CP/M, OSX, whatever...not cheap!