RE: Windows registry cleanup tools - PowerQuest Drive Image

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

At 01:03 AM 8/30/06 -0400, Harry Binswanger wrote:
>
>Thank you. Just to get this absolutely clear for myself . . .
>
>Suppose I've installed Ghost 2003 and have used it to make an image on my
>USB external drive of my laptop drive (C:).

Actually you don't have to install Ghost 2003 on the laptop. You can run
Ghost from the Ghost CD (if you can find the directory on the CD with I
think GHOST.EXE.) If your laptop had a floppy drive, you could run Ghost
from a Ghost boot floppy, with GHOST.EXE and a few drivers for the USB
drive etc.

The Ghost CD gives you Ghost Explorer, which is a shell that lets you
browse through *.GHO image files and extract individual files, and creates
Ghost floppy disks, but it mostly contains useless bloat like Windows WMV
files for movie demonstrations of how to use Ghost.

>Then suppose the hard disk on
>my laptop goes kaplooey. Could I then walk over to CompUSA, buy a new
>laptop drive, physically swap it out for the broken one inside my laptop ,
>and somehow boot the laptop through the USB from the external drive? How?

No, you'd boot the laptop from the laptop's CD drive. Then you'd restore
the hard drive installation from the backup.gho file on the external USB
drive.

>my BIOS does not allow booting from USBs? Hmmm, maybe I need to burn DRDOS
>from Ghost onto a CD, so I could boot from that? Is that doable?

The most important Ghost file is GHOST.EXE, which as I understand it runs
DRDOS and the Ghost utilities. (Boy, those old DOS programs can do a lot in
a small package.) In addition, when you create a Ghost boot disk, you can
take the drivers that are already installed on your computer and install
them on the floppy disk too.

>At any rate, if I can somehow boot the laptop using DRDOS,

>From the Ghost CD, if you find the right directory.

Here's my notes from the last time I did it:

Ghost Backup and Restore from Ghost CD. Boot CD, change default drive from
A: to C: (or whatever the CD drive is), change directory (CD) to SUPPORT
directory, then RUN GHOST.

>could I then
>restore from the external drive's image and proceed as if nothing had
>happened (or nothing since my last image-making)?

Yes. I tested it with my old Win98 computers and 8GB HDs, and it worked.

>Worriedly,
>Harry

You're right to worry. I wouldn't trust anyone, or any manual, if I hadn't
done it myself.

It's mandatory to test your backup before the disaster, to make sure it
works the way you think it does. If I had had to restore my system to a
blank HD from the MS backup tapes than I had been making religiously, it
wouldn't have worked, because MS backup doesn't back up a working operating
system. I wonder how many people have been surprised by that.

>> >my laptop's external drive is attached?
>>
>>Yes, Ghost natively runs DRDOS, as I recall. and you can also run it with
>>MS-DOS if you use your own MS-DOS.
>>
>>It did recognize an external USB hard drive, and I saved Ghost images to
>>the external drive.
>>
>>Norman

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Norman Bauman
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