Norton Ghost 2001

Backs up hard drives to CD-R or over a network

Product: Norton Ghost 2001 (Personal Edition tested)
From: Symantec
For: PC with hard drive and floppy disk
Price: TBD
Pros: Can clone your system's hard drive to a second drive, or image the drive -- including all partitions -- to a bootable CD-R or CD-RW disc, over a TCP/IP connection, or via a peer-to-peer network connection.
Cons: Any CD-R write (for example, caused by a "quick erased" CDRW disc) failure causes the program to dump to DOS. No way to resume a failed write attempt.

Strongest Competitors: PowerQuest's Drive Image

Those looking for an easy and inexpensive way to back up an entire hard drive should consider Norton Ghost 2001. It doesn't require preformatted CD-R media (and in fact, doesn't work if the media are preformatted or "quick erased") and it can even create a self-booting CD that allows you to restore your system to its original state with a minimum of fuss -- and without requiring Windows or any other operating system to be present on the destination hard drive.

Done in DOS
How can the program run when there's no operating system on the destination drive? It includes its own OS on the floppy disk you must make to use GHOST. This disk, which you can customize via several options, also contains the necessary drivers to enable your CD-R drive or network card and TCP/IP connection, and includes the program, too. Thus, as you can imagine, the program has a somewhat lean-and-mean interface.

The Interface
It's not all that sparse, however. The CD-R option provides drivers for a wide array of IDE and SCSI CD recorders on the floppy. You get mouse support and a DOS-based "Windows-like" graphical environment. The program is very easy to use -- somewhat easier, yet more powerful, in fact, than PowerQuest's competing Drive Image.

Room for Improvement
Our main complaint with the program is the inelegant way it handles (or doesn't handle, we should say) errors while writing to a CD. Defective CD-R media are certainly not unheard of and even error-free media that have been previously recorded and then erased using a "Quick Erase" function such as that recommended by Adaptec Easy CD Creator, will cause the program to abort, essentially making the disks you've already produced useless. The Erase CD utility supplied by HP with its recorders doesn't work, either. You can, however, reformat a CDRW disk using the "Full Erase" option in Easy CD Creator and the discs will work in Ghost. This option takes about 20 per disc, as opposed to two or three minutes to quick erase a CDRW disc. We'd recommend using (non-eraseable) CD-R media to avoid potential problems.

The logical solution to this whole situation would be for the program to simply ask you if you'd like to try again with a different disk. We can't see how this little bit of error-checking would add appreciably to the program's size.

Conclusion
Despite this annoyance, Ghost is the simplest, most effective HD imaging utility we've used yet. Recommended.

For Further Reading
Manufacturer's website: www.symantec.com

Sidebar: Drive Image Pro 4.0
although Drive Image Pro 4.0 offers similar functionality to that of Ghost, we do not recommend it. For one thing, it requires two floppy disks to boot, making it more awkward to use. Then there's the issue of the "Fake Floppy Not Found" error message plaguing many users after installation (The cure for this problem is to boot from a Windows 98 or Windows Me startup diskette.At the A:\> prompt type: > Fdisk /mbr<enter>, then reboot.)

Lastly, we have found it to be unable to copy data from some drives that Norton Ghost was able to handle. Ghost costs a little more, but it's worth it.

A trial version of Drive Image Pro is available, if you want to give it a try anyway.