What if, one fine morning you discover that your machine has crashed due to the file system getting corrupt? Even if you had a backup of your data, it’d take quite some time to restore everything to normal. You’d have to install the operating system, all applications, and your personal preferences before you even get to the data. Norton Ghost 2001 is a solution to these problems. The software works with Win 9x, NT, and 2000. It helps you clone your hard drive and restore it easily.

The software dumps all your hard disk data into an image file, which can either be stored on a local partition, a network drive or burnt on to a CD. The main application or the Norton Ghost Executable has to be run from a boot disk, which can be created using the Ghost Boot Wizard. You can then run the program from DOS and create or restore any hard drive image.

Apart from this, the product also has various other utilities. You wouldn’t want to keep creating an image every time you made changes to your system. That’s why, there’s the Ghost Explorer for updating your system’s ghost image with the latest file changes. The application looks similar to Windows Explorer and supports drag-n-drop. Another utility called G Disk is a DOS application, which lets you do command-line partitioning and formatting. It also gives better partition information report than Fdisk and you can also hide or unhide partitions. So you can create a separate hidden partition on your hard disk and dump the ghost image there; safe from prying eyes and accidental deletion possibilities.

There are several ways to create a ghost image. You can use disk duplication, which duplicates hard disks; disk image file creation to create an image for the entire hard disk; partition duplication for backing up partitions, etc. Norton Ghost also supports spanning. So if the size of your image file exceeds the amount of free space you have, the image is split into smaller spans that can then be moved to a different media, say a network drive or another hard disk. While restoring, the software will ask for the image spans in the sequence they are created.

Interestingly, suppose your image file is stored on a network drive or a friend’s machine and your hard disk fails. You can connect to the network or any other standalone machine over a peer-to-peer link, either through your parallel port, USB port, or even your network card. The Ghost boot disk contains some generic drivers for these hardware connections. Network administrators can also use Norton Ghost to deploy multiple machines on a network. If you get machines of the same configuration, then you can configure one, create a ghost image, and copy it across the remaining machines.

Ghost also has many command-line parameters, such as those for checking image file integrity, etc. This version of Ghost also supports Linux EXT2 file system apart from FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS. It also features writing disk images directly to attached CDR/RW drives and cloning from one PC to another.

Looking at the host of features, it justifies its price of Rs 2,300.

Ankur Saxena at PCQ labs