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 back your software and other things–if these are licensed–but you would not get back your data. In other cases, you might get back your data, but loose all the special arrangements you had in your hard drive, and you would have to ride the learning curve again until you get familiar with the new drive. This is the most popular reasons why people want to clone their hard disk. Making a ghost of your hard drive would always keep your computer protected; not by making it fool proof against viruses, but by having a mirror image stored which can be installed at the click of the mouse. When disaster strikes and your computer collapses for any reason, you could 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 so, as many software programs have come out especially designed for this task. However, even today, the most popular and used remains the Norton Ghost. This is more or less proved by the fact that the cloning of a drive is also known as ghosting of a drive, after the software Ghost.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Ghost 2003 (software)

1. Get the 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 would 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 would 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 dialog box. Here, type something that you would remember as a name.

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 even be accommodated on a CD. This is because the hard disk is captured as an image.
• Always have all your application closed when you run GHOST.
• Pay attention to the automatic virus scanners which run as soon as the computer is on, and do not show on the screen that they are active. You have to get all your applications closed.
• Be very careful while you are choosing the source and destination drives. The source is the drive you are copying; the destination is where you would copy it. In case you choose the wrong sequence everything in your computer could be wiped off, at the click of a mouse.