You know how it is, that when your old disk is dying, it is highly unlikely that you’d buy a new disk that is of exactly the same size. I did the save-to-FTP-server as a backup as well, just in case something went wrong.Īn interesting thing is about cloning disks of different size. It took over 4 hours to save the image a FTP server. The cloning and ripping is not terribly complicated. Ghost for Unix also skips empty sectors, meaning sectors that contain NULL values (which is not the same as a sector that is not used to store any useful data). There are some compression options to reduce the among of space the image takes (if you are going to rip it to a FTP server). You’d need a FTP server to do this of course, and, obviously the FTP server had better be on your LAN otherwise you’re going to take forever to get the image transferred over. You can also clone the disk directly to another disk, if they are already both attached to the computer. You can rip the disk and store the image onto a FTP server, where you can later fetch it and write it into a new disk. Ghost for Unix offers cloning of entire disks as well as of individual disk partitions. I downloaded the ISO image, burnt it to a CDROM, and booted up the desktop from the CDROM. But hey, there is also a Ghost-clone called Ghost for Unix, which is Open Source and free to download and use. Okay, I could simply plug the disk into my Linux box and be done.Īnyway, I started to think about tools like Norton Ghost. Had this been Linux, I would be quite happy dd’ing the disks. This would be the first time I’m trying to do on Windows. I’m familiar with various tools in Linux. Now, I’ve dealt with dying disks on Linux systems many times before. So what I needed to do was to clone the dying disk to a new disk. I didn’t want to re-install the OS and all the software, partly because I can’t find the serial numbers of some of the software I have already installed. My (wife’s) desktop PC at home started to act up.

Norton ghost alternative open source