CREATING HARD DRIVE IMAGE

 This is a tutorial or review of how to take an image, or backup, of a computer using Norton Ghost 15.0 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 15.0 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.

Norton Ghost is no longer available for the home user. The Ghost Solution Suite is a good alternative as is True Image by Acronis