Image HD

Because we selected partition to image we will be offered another screen asking to select the partition on the HD. I recommend you label your HDs in Windows, this way you know for sure which HD your looking at. Note in the picture Drive1 and Drive2. You should also look at the total size.

You will now be offered a place to save the image. You want to select another partition or HD. You can also select a mass storage device, if you loaded the DOS drivers for that device. If you want to save it to CDR(W), you can't. you must first stage the image to a HD or partition. You will also want to use the -split=600 command. This tells ghost to make the image in to 600M chucks.

Example "A:\ Ghost -split=600"

You will now be offered proceed with image dump. Make sure the correct partition to be imaged is selected, and that the correct HD to save the image is selected. This is also a benefit to HD to image when compared to HD to clone. If you mess up here making an image, it will not be that bad. But if you clone backwards, you will have just messed up. If for example you cloned your second HD on to your first HD, when you meant for it to be the other way, you may be very pissed. Cause there is very little chance that you will be able to recover your overwritten data. So agin, this is why I chose partition to image.

When Ghost has finished you will have an image file on your second HD. This image file is only the data. So if you have a 6G HD with 3G of Data, your image file will be around 3G. Ghost does not image swap files, so it will not be exactly the same size. You can also start Ghost by using the "-Z6" command. The -Z tell Ghost to compress the image. the number 6 in this example can be any number 1 to 9, with 9 being the most compression. The higher the compression the, the slower the imaging. You can also make a skip file. This will tell Ghost to skip files and directories you specify. For example, you can have Ghost skip the recycle bin, and temp folder. Or have it skip all the text files. Look here for more on skip and other useful switches.