Sadly Ghost 2003 doesnt seem to work with modern hardware ='(

[DaveLembke]

The one system I have that is Windows XP Pro SP3 I wanted to create a ghost image of. Sadly even though Ghost 2003 worked for years for me with Windows 2000 Pro & Windows XP Home and Pro versions, I found that it does not like modern hardware.

This system was built inexpensively for like $42 for the motherboard and the rest of the parts and unused OS license. Friend traded me a Athlon II x2 215 AM3 CPU dual-core for a Zotac ITX motherboard I had that I didnt need. So I built up this Athlon II x2 215 2.7Ghz with 2GB DDR3 1333mhz RAM in a Biostar A780L3C as seen here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138376

The initial build had SATA Optical DVD-RW and 500GB HDD and Ghost 2003 errored out after the reboot to boot the ghost imaging process with CD/DVD drive not found. So I had another bay available in the HP Pavilion A1210N case that I used and added an IDE optical DVD-RW drive into it.

Tried again and still no optical drive detected. Ok... disconnect the Optical SATA drive and try again.

Now Ghost crashes with an error short way into the image process and it causes a system reboot.

Tried again and same issue a quick error flashes and then reboot.

Ok lets try another method... USB 2.0 160GB external HDD, and drive not mounted. Ok lets try USB 1.1 drivers instead with Ghost. Reboot and still no drive detected.

Threw the towel in on Ghost 2003 with modern hardware. I am guessing that the issue is that there is a driver that Ghost uses to address the hardware at the DOS level and the hardware is too new and does not have legacy support for the old Ghost DOS driver/instructions.

I guess I am going to use a different imaging utility. I guess my days of using Ghost 2003 with XP are coming to an end since once all my obsolete systems are gone, even XP on modern guts will not be able to be imaged 

Figured I'd post this here in case anyone else out there attempts to image a newer computer with XP with Ghost 2003 and finds the same troubles.

This system btw runs perfectly fine, so I know its not the hardware as defective, I am pretty sure that its that the hardware is too new to support Ghost DOS operation of Ghost 2003. 

[Allan]

Acronis True Image (not free) and Macrium Reflect (free) are excellent alternatives and will work just fine for you.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks Allan 

I've used Macrium before with Windows 7 imaging and it worked well. Going to use it with this somewhat modern XP build.

[Allan]

Any time Dave.

[Salmon Trout]

Ghost 2003 build .995 supports SATA, apparently. Earlier builds do not, but personally I would follow Allan's advice.

[BC_Programmer]

I used Macrium Reflect to backup my SSD contents before formatting and installing Windows on this new computer. I particularly like how it allows me to mount the image of that former drive as a new drive letter- and even has a checkbox that allows me to access it without being impeded by Ownership issues.

I haven't actually restored an image but I would be surprised if it was not as good as the backup and mount capabilities. I was quite impressed actually, particularly given that it is Freeware.

[DaveLembke]

I particularly like how it allows me to mount the image of that former drive as a new drive letter- and even has a checkbox that allows me to access it without being impeded by Ownership issues.

Interesting. I didnt notice this feature when I backed up imaged my Windows 7 build about 9 months ago.

Appears to be better than the Ghost Explorer feature that Ghost 2003 had where you could access an image and extract data from the image without having to push the image completely to a drive to extract a file or bunch of files.

Being able to mount an image as a mapped volume sounds really cool. 

[patio]

Been using and recommending Reflect for some years now...the only heads up i will throw out there is to make sure to Verify the images upon creation...
It's only happened 2 or 3 times to me but it's no fun reaching 96% of a restore only to see that dreaded error message...

[Salmon Trout]

I am using Windows 7 Pro. The built-in Backup Image feature in Vista onwards (Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise only) makes the image to a regular .vhd virtual disk file which you can mount as a drive letter. I had used it quite happily on a couple of USB external drives but a problem came when I got a NAS drive because Windows Image Backup requires a network disk to be NTFS formatted (it is) and also to have the disk sectors aligned on 4K boundaries (they aren't). I got around this by creating an NTFS 128 GB .vhd on the NAS and mounting it as a drive letter when I wanted to make a backup. Thus I had a vhd on a vhd. It meant a couple of extra steps when attempting an image restore by booting using the W7 recovery disk - opening a console and mounting the vhd using Diskpart, and possibly rebooting the NAS if Samba was locking the vhd. I did actually try these steps to prove it all worked because I won't trust any backup solution unless I have used it to do a successful restore.

This all changed when I got an OCZ Vector SSD; it came with a free licence for Acronis True Image HD (a limited version). This is, I think, intended mainly for easy OS cloning when installing the SSD but it works pretty well as an image backup solution, and works equally well on the NAS and USB drives. The SSD failed after 6 weeks and was returned to the store for a refund, but that's another story. The Acronis backups are in their .tib format and these can be mounted as drive letters. They can be converted to vhd format using a feature on full Acronis versions. After the SSD failed I successfully restored the most recent Acronis backup of the disk from the NAS to a spinning drive (I then reversed the steps I had taken to make Windows SSD-friendly).

I also have a free version of Macrium installed on each of the family's laptops and these have been backed up & restored to/from the NAS using wireless connections.

[Salmon Trout]

make sure to Verify the images upon creation...

Absolutely.

[Salmon Trout]

The Acronis backups are in their .tib format and these can be mounted as drive letters.

Actually on the limited edition I have they are not exactly mounted as drive letters; When you click on a .tib file in Windows Explorer, you see the drive backup as a read-only folder. You have to pony up for a paid-for version to get drive letter and read/write functionality.

[patio]

That's interesting because the version that ships with new Seagate HDD's allows me to access the .tibs.

[Salmon Trout]

That's interesting because the version that ships with new Seagate HDD's allows me to access the .tibs.

I didn't say I couldn't access the .tibs, just that I can't mount one as a drive letter - I have to double click the .tib and then a "folder" opens up under it which contains the contents of the backup, read-only. To get the drive-letter access and read/write features I would have to pay for an upgrade licence.

[patio]

Ahhh gotcha.
I misunderstood.

[DaveLembke]

I had used it quite happily on a couple of USB external drives but a problem came when I got a NAS drive because Windows Image Backup requires a network disk to be NTFS formatted (it is) and also to have the disk sectors aligned on 4K boundaries (they aren't). I got around this by creating an NTFS 128 GB .vhd on the NAS and mounting it as a drive letter when I wanted to make a backup. Thus I had a vhd on a vhd.

Good to know the work around for Windows 7 with sectors aligned to 4k boundaries. I have a Buffalo brand NAS, but its not NTFS its XFS so i cant use this at the get go, but if I ever use freenas etc to make one out of an old box, that is NTFS its good to know of this 128GB .vhd file mount work around. However use on an external USB NTFS formatted drive is probably the path I would take.

Also cool that you got Acronis True Image ( Limited version ) with your OCZ SSD. I bought 4 OCZ drives and they didnt come with any bundleware   

In the past, I found a way to use Seagates clone utility to clone drives that weren't Seagate. This was with a system with 3 hard drives in it. Normally 2 drives in this system, the 3rd was added to take the image and to be removed when the clone process was complete. The seagate clone software that came with the drive had to detect a valid Seagate drive to function, but then you could essentially use it then to select the 2 other drives which were not seagate such as a Western Digital drive to clone to a Maxtor ( before maxtor was bought out by seagate ).

I suppose they never thought anyone would use it to add a 3rd drive and clone 2 off brands. But as long as the software was satisfied with the single Seagate present, because it allowed for you to specify the Source and Destination drive, it allowed for this clone to happen between 2 drives that weren't seagate..LOL     This was quite a few years ago.

I tried to use DD a few times and didnt have good luck with it. It seemed to clone the drives but when attempting to boot off of the cloned drive it wouldnt boot and acted like the OS was missing. Also tried Clonezilla and also ran into problems with that which were similar to DD. *Also the drives cloned remained with the original hardware, so this was not an illegal attempt to take a single copy of Windows 7 and put it on 2 different boxes. I don't do illegal stuff like that. I buy licenses if I need extras. So given that the hardware didnt change it should work  I was able to dock the drive that was freshly cloned in my SATA/USB external dock and navigate through the drive as an external USB drive and see all the contents there, although I did not perform a check on size of data on the original and the clone, so that is where I would expect to find differences between them. Was thinking that maybe the MBR needed to be tweaked to make the drive bootable etc, but any software that doesnt work and should, if i have to fight with it, its not worth my time usually.

 Was thinking it may have been because I was trying to clone between 2 different sized drives and while there was plenty of space to clone a 80GB source drive to a 160GB destination drive, these may need to be used among exact matching capacity drives etc. One thing I liked with Ghost 2003 was that the image could be taken off of a 160GB drive that was say 5GB in size of a clean install and you could place that onto a 13GB drive and it would work flawlessly, as well as place a 13GB drives 5GB image onto a 160GB drive with no problems. This also worked when direct cloning since I guess Ghost doesnt look at the empty space on the drive, and other clone hardware and software out there seem to want to perform a bit for bit copy vs only bits that actually contain data which ghost appears to do.

Here is the Windows DD software I used: http://sourceforge.net/projects/windd/

Clonezilla was just burned from ISO to disc. Don't recall the version of it, but it was a few years ago.