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 12.0 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.

For a limited time, you can Get 10% off of Norton Ghost 14.0 just for entering the following coupon code when you order:
Code: 10NGHST08 This offer expires January 10, 2009 - Enjoy!

See all of the Advanced Backup and Recovery features of the new Norton Ghost 14.0

Post your comments or questions about Norton Ghost

Comments	Date
By Graeme Hudsmith	2008-07-15 10:46:30
Can Norton Ghost 14 make DVD recovery disks of my computers hard disk. And in the event of an hard disk drive failure, I could replace the ahrd disk with a new one and then use the recovery disks to restore back to the origian state before the hard disk failure?? Many thanks for your help Graeme Hudsmith
By Randy	2008-04-22 08:53:09
You could disable the Norton Ghost Service when you are going to use the SIM program. If you are not familiar with disabling services, this is not a recommended step.
By ANDY	2008-04-21 16:49:28
Have Norton Ghost 12.0 on my computer I find that when I use flightsimulator programs it really slows down my system. I removed Ghost 12.0 and noticed a good inprovement when using flightsim programs. Any Ideas? Thank you for your time. Andy...

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