Creating a Hard Drive Image using Norton Ghost

This is a tutorial of how to take an image, or backup, of a computer using Norton Ghost. I have used the Ghost program in the past and always found that the best recovery scenario was to use a restore floppy. It always worked just fine. This is a review of the Norton Ghost hard drive imaging process.

I downloaded the program from the Symantec site and installed it with no problems. I have a bad habit of not reading the directions and just trying the program. I don’t believe it should take a 5 hour training course to use a program that I am semi familiar with. This is what I found.

After the installation, live update and a reboot, this screen came up.

I plugged in a Lacie external hard drive and Norton Ghost found it with no problems.

As you can see on the next screen, Norton scanned my system and recommended this strategy. Of course, I took the recommended settings.

The recommended settings on this screen looked like what I wanted to accomplish so I accepted it and clicked next.

Of course I wanted to choose my C Drive.

I had to think about this next screen for a minute. The recommended setting looked like what I wanted but the other choice said that I should always create an independent recovery point. I took the recommended setting and clicked next.

Norton Ghost chose my external drive as the backup destination.

Then there were a couple other screens that really didn’t tell me much so I took the defaults to get to the next screen. This screen just tells you what the program is going to do. It looks good to me at this point, so I checked the Run Backup Now checkbox and smacked the Finish button.

All is going well. As you can see, I can still work while the program executes its commands, which is a great feature.

When Norton Ghost was finished with the image, I checked to see if the file were indeed where it was supposed to be. It was.

So far, so good. Norton Ghost created an image on a separate drive so that I can store that file in a safe location in case something happens to my computer. Now let’s see how Norton Ghost does at a restore of this image in the next tutorial.

On a scale of Bytes to Brontobytes, Norton Ghost hard drive imaging gets a Petabyte. The imaging process worked but there were a lot of steps that could have been eliminated to make the disk imaging process easier.

See all of the Advanced Backup and Recovery features of the new Norton Ghost 

Post your comments or questions about Norton Ghost

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