Ghost Software

Recently picked up an Libretto 100. When I fired it up, I noticed the hard drive was giving the ticking time bomb signal, ie, it's getting ready to die, so you better get a new drive.

Well, got the new drive in and suddenly realized I don't have drive cloning software.

I heard that Ghost USED to be freeware. Does anyone know where I can find it? Yeah, I'm cheap SOB!!! Deal with it!

Also, does the freeware version cover larger drives, such as 2.1 Gb?

I'm not aware of Ghost ever being freeware but I don't know it's history that well before Symantec bought it.

One trick you can do that is free though is dump the drive to a file via a linux boot disk/cd (if you can get it to work accordingly on that system).

If you have the external hardware you need to boot it you could use a basic boot cd or recovery cd from a few linux vendors that run on lesser hardware (I think in this case Knoppix may or may not run depending on the resources it wants, but it may still boot in CLI after it detects the RAM or you can force it to just CLI. Alternatively you could probably boot DSL (Damn Small Linux) or another floppy based distro (trinux is one I used to use but more so for the security tools).

Then to dump your hard drive like a file you use the command "dd" to dump the raw data of a device to a file. The arguments are "if=" (input file) and "of=" (output file). Assuming your drive is IDE it will probably show up as /dev/hda (/dev/hda1 would be partition 1 on drive 1 (drive a in this case), or hda2 would be partition 2 on drive a, hdb would be all of drive 2 or "b" in it's entirety and not specifying a partition)

If you can get it on a network you can possibly do an smbmount //servername/servershare /DirectoryToLinkTo -o username=yourusernameonserver then dd it over the network.

Or attach the notebook drive to a desktop with a converter (useful to have and cheap) and dump it via your desktop.

The dump command is:

Then you could compress it afterwards or (I haven't done it this way but imagine it probably works):

Now that I think about it if you check out the Universal Boot CD there are some tools there also to do hard drive backups if you don't like playing linux.

The other problem is this also assumes you have somewhere to write the file to with enough disk space or that it's a simple file system (Fat16, fat32) that it knows how to write the file to **be careful if writing to the same drive in the case that it corrupts things**.

Ghost is good because it can restore the files to a different drive size. I'm sure you can google around for a trick to do this as well with linux but just for a system backup this is what I've done in the past.

From what I remember, Ghost was freeware/shareware before Norton got hold of it and turned it into bloatware.

The whole thing would fit on a bootable 3.5" 720K floppy.

Of course, once Norton got hold of it all that changed.

Regarding the Linux approach, I've tinkered with Linux before to keep my UNIX skills sharp between assignments, but recently, I've pretty much just let that aspect slide, so will probably pass.

I'm thinking I'm thinking I'm going to ahead and upgrade (?) the thing from Win95 to Win98 SE anyway, so may just use a horse computer to set the drive up and load the software.

Last time I looked, Seagate still had a free version of the pretty good Acronis True Image cloning software.

Decided to go ahead and load the new drive with Windows 98SE. That way I'm sure of getting all the junk out of the system that may have been left over from old installs and deinstalls and starting fresh so I can make my own mistakes!

g4u

g4u

FWIW, and for future needs, g4u is a nice tool for hard drive imaging. Despite the "unix" in tis name, it will clone almost any hard drive (that can be read).

Clonezilla Live is another drive cloner--or you can just use *nix dd.