norton ghost

Dop you think that defrag will adverdsely affect the drive image generated by norton ghost?

 

Do you mean you made an image of your hard drive and put it on the hard drive you made the image of?

Generally, one puts images in their own partition with nothing else in the partition so that there's less chance of corruption.

I can't guarantee this because I've never done it, but in theory, it shouldn't mess up the ghost image because of the way defrag works. Defrag takes all the file pointers of a file as it spans sectors of a hard disk, and moves them around so all the file pointers (file pieces) are next to each other in what is called "contigious space" (which is a fancy way of saying sectors next to each other). As a ghost image spans multiple sectors, it must have file pointers. Defrag only reassociates those file pointers after it moves the data on each sector to sectors next to each other.

If all that is just gibberish to you, the long and the short of it is, it shouldn't. But there's no guarantee on that. I would suggest a five step process instead:

1)Make a new partition on your hard drive to contain the ghost image.
2)Make a new ghost image (of the partition not containing the ghost image) to put on the new partition.
3)defrag your hard drive
4)check and make sure everything is okay after the defrag.
5)Make a new ghost image (of the defragged partition) and replace the old one with the new one.

 

>Generally, one puts images in their own partition with nothing else in the partition so that there's less chance of corruption.

It's true. But I don't have the option to add another partition so I probalby will burn the image to CDR.

 

Yes, well there's that too. *chuckle* That's the most often done thing, but I wasn't sure you had one....

 

If you burn the image, it will be burned in an unfragmented state, so I'm not sure why you are concerned about defraging it.