I have a system hard drive in an old XP computer. I took it out of the computer and connected it as an external usb disk to another computer that has Ghost 15 installed and running on Windows 7. I made one time backup of the external disk. When I was going through the steps of the wizard after selecting the external disk, on the next screen called Related Drives it said:
"In the previous panel, you selected a drive with applications that are configured to use one or more of the drives below. To help with a successful recovery you should add all related drives"
In the related drives list, the active system drive C was listed twice as two identical items with its Drive name, Size, and Applications. The applications were:
At the bottom of the panel I had the option not to include related drives but it said:
“If you choose not to add the recommended related drives to this backup, you may not be able to fully restore the computer.
I left these two instances of the system hard drive checked and Ghost made a backup of both the external and system hard drive which is huge - almost 1TB and as such I can’t use it as I initially planed.
My plan is to make a backup of the external disk which is used for an XP system drive on another computer and has about 7GB used space. I’ll keep the backup on the computer running Ghost and if restoration is needed I will attach it in the same way to the computer with Ghost and restore it there.
Do I really need to include in the backup the huge 1TB system hard drive of the computer running Ghost in order to make a backup of a small external drive? Why it was made to work like that?
When you create an image backup of a HD, the HD should be seen in its correct geometry. That is it should be in the computer where it is working. Not in a USB enclosure attached to another computer. That is likely to lead to a non restoring image.
Similarly, when you restore an image to a HD, that HD should be seen in its correct geometry. It should be in its "final resting place".
Well, I wanted to make a backup of a clean system installation before installing any programs including Ghost. I guess this is not possible then. Even for creating recovery CD I have to have Ghost installed right?
I still can't understand why it is not possible to work as I expected. When I use my XP system hard drive as external usb on the other Windows 7 computer it is assigned the letter G there and it works without any problems as an external hard drive - I can browse and even change files if I want to. Then when I plug it back in the old computer it is working perfectly as the system drive C.
If the drive gets modified when used with each computer this modification doesn’t interfere with the intended usage. I can't understand what's preventing Ghost to make a backup working in the same way
The reason why it wants to image the other drive is that when you have it connected externally Ghost recognises it as an operating system drive but not as an active partition. (because it's not when it's in that configuration).
So it suggests you image the other drive(s) as well.
But as you already found out you can skip that because it's unnecessary.
As for us not reccomending you image a drive using USB, thats not Ghosts fault or even really windows.
USB is almost entirely software driven and it does not have direct low level access to the hard drive through the system BIOS.
It may work in some situations but it's always better to get the proper geometry and drive translation though the system BIOS.
Also, you actually don't need to install Ghost to make a system image, you can make an image using the Ghost recovery disk.
If you attach the drive directly to the a motherboard using an IDE or SATA cable, then your chances of success are greatly increased.
There is one thing that can effect it and that is that a few system manufactures use a non-standard head geometry of 240 heads instead of the more common 255 head alignment.
I can't remember off the top of my head, I don't have my notes here but I think HP and Lenovo are 2 of the big companies and I can't remember the third. Thats why Brian added the comment about "In it's final resting place".
You can't take a drive that was written in a 240 head geometry and expect to get a correct read using a system that only supports 255 heads. USB, by the way, only knows 255 heads so using an external adapter with a 240 head drive will always lead to problems trying to copy or image a drive.
If you were to put that old drive in the old system and make a cold image, the drive will be read correctly and you will be able to restore that image onto either type of system as long as the image is restored with the hard drive directly connected to that system.
If your old system and your new system both use the same geometry and head alignment, then you will also have no problem attaching the old drive to the motherboard of the new system to image it or copy it.
It will be "read" correctly because it is attached to the system that created the partitions and wrote all the data to it. If you restore an image back onto that system, because the drive is attached to the motherboard and being controled by the system BIOS, the image will be written back to that drive correctly, exactly how that system wants it.
For some reason, computer manufactures didn't try to make things easy or standard in that regard.
As far as USB goes, it never really was designed for hard drives in the first place but more for other hardware and peripherals.
Regarding the cold image, on my old computer which system hard drive I want to back up, I don't have Ghost installed and I only have a CD player not a burner. Is it possible then to make the cold image?
I have a recovery disk for my newer windows 7 computer, I haven't used it yet but as far as I remember that CD was created with some driver evaluation of my hardware so I guess it is valid only for the computer it was made for.
By the way, regarding backing USB hard drives, is it OK to do it if these drives are always used as USB hard drives attached to the computer they were originally backed up on? I mean the resting place of those drives are to be used like that - external USB drives.
