How to Ghost a Hard Drive

There are times when you may want to duplicate your hard disk as an emergency measure, say, in the event a virus strikes and your hard disk is destroyed. In such cases, you could get your software and other things back---if these were licensed---but you would not get your data back. In other cases, you might get your data back but lose all the special arrangements you had in your hard drive, and you would have to ride the learning curve again to get familiar with the new drive. These are the most popular reasons why people want to clone their hard disks.



Making a ghost of your hard drive will keep your computer protected, not by making it immune to viruses but by providing you with a stored mirror image that can be installed with the click of the mouse. When disaster strikes and your computer collapses for any reason, you can be as cool as a cucumber, knowing that all you have to do is ghost your drive back and your computer is as good as new.



There are many ways to do this, as many software programs have come out especially designed for this task. However, the most popular and the most often used remains Norton Ghost. This is more or less proven by the fact that cloning a drive is also known as "ghosting" a drive after the software Ghost.

Difficulty:

Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Ghost 2003 (software)

1. Get the latest version of Ghost and start the wizard. Always use the wizard, as this will take you through the task with no hiccups.

2. You will get a "clone" indication; click on the "clone" and you will get a new window. Here, click on the disk you want to use as a source for the cloning. In other words, this is the disk you want to be ghosted. You do this by clicking on a partition (C:, D:, E:, F: or whatever disk drive you want ghosted).

3. Click on a destination where you will ghost the selected source drive. Click "Next."

4. There will be a warning sign on the screen saying that you need to check the procedure, as it will overwrite the chosen partition with the ghost installation. Accept by clicking "Next." There will be a Ghost Disk Identification dialogue box. Here, type a name that you will remember.

5. Another window will appear to with "Run Now" indication. Click on it to start the ghost process.

Tips & Warnings

• No matter how big your drive is, it can be burned to one or many CDs or DVDs. Ghost has the ability to compress the data as it creates the ghost image, which makes the image size smaller than the original size of the hard drive it is ghosting.

• Always have all your applications closed when you run Ghost.

• Pay attention to the automatic virus scanners that run as soon as the computer is turned on and do not show on the screen that they are active. You have to close all your applications.

• Be very careful when you are choosing the source and destination drives. The source is the drive you are copying; the destination drive is where you will copy it. If you were to choose the wrong sequence, everything in your computer could be wiped off with the click of a mouse.

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• Symantec: Norton Ghost