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Norton Ghost ReplacementFollow

#1 Jun 17 2012 at 12:33 PM Rating: Decent
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I'm trying to find a replacement for Norton Ghost or some help resizing a partition. I use to love this tool for doing partition work (resizing, moving, etc), but the idiots at Symantec decided it was time to give Ghost the same attention they have given the rest of their crapware.


Here's what I'm trying to do. My boot drive is a 1.5 TB drive with just one partition taking up the full drive. I'm wanting to reduce that partition to half it's size (around 750 gb) so I can use the remaining half to install linux. The main issue is that I don't really have the time right now to do a reinstall of everything (otherwise, I would have already started). Back in my XP days, I would just use Ghost to image my partition, then just change it's size when I restored it. But since I have heard it has gone the same was as the rest of Symantec's products, I'm at a loss now as to what to use to accomplish this task anymore
#2 Jun 17 2012 at 1:48 PM Rating: Excellent
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The enterprise version of ghost included with ghost solution suite 2.5 (Ghost enterprise 11.2) works flawlessly and is my preferred alternative.

If you want a free version, use Microsoft's ImageX ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748966(v=ws.10) ), which I believe is included in windows 7, or available as part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) for XP or 7. You will likely want to also download a copy of the free GimageX GUI frontend if you want a "ghost like" interface ( http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit-tools/gimagex/ )

Your other options are the Alteris suite, which Symantec bought, Acronis true image which works pretty well, Bootit! bare metal http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-bare-metal.htm which i have never used but looks interesting, Paragon's imaging programs, or the free clonezilla http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/. If you aren't going to use ghost, I'd probably reccommend ImageX.
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#3 Jun 23 2012 at 6:21 PM Rating: Good
My office uses HD Clone. A lot faster than good ol' Norton Ghost was, and it's never given us a bad image over months of constant use.
#4 Jun 23 2012 at 7:19 PM Rating: Excellent
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how fast are you able to take a what sized image with it?
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#5 Jun 23 2012 at 9:57 PM Rating: Good
We have what we call the "golden image" of our biggest client's software installed on a Win7 Pro 64 bit setup. It's about 25-30 GB if I remember right (since it's a clean install but has a lot of medical programs on it too) and HD Clone can turn one of those over in about 15-ish minutes. Larger drives (rescued from dying PCs) are usually done in an hour or so. It runs off a USB drive as well, so we don't have to mess around with the floppy disk like we did with Norton Ghost. (Actually, I think the only reason we stopped with Norton Ghost was because we misplaced our USB floppy right...)
#6 Jun 24 2012 at 12:17 AM Rating: Excellent
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Hmm, thats about the same throughput we are getting with Ghost multicast to our ghost server instance. I do know that WIM write and capture via imageX launched from SCCM takes a stupid amount of time longer, but people like it because it's microsoft.
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