Backing up to external HD using Ghost

I have been thinking about getting an external hard drive to do Ghost backups of my notebook. I've done a few such backups on DVDs; I like to do a backup every week or so and will end up with a mountain of DVDs after a while. When browsing through New Egg I noticed that they had a precaution that these external hard drives run on Windows drivers and normally will not work in DOS mode. Since Ghost reverts to DOS when doing a system backup does this mean that Ghost will not work with these external drives? New Egg said that some drive manufacturers do offer DOS drivers for their externals, but I don't know if this would work. Has anyone had experience doing system backups to externals using Ghost?

 

Depending on the version of Ghost, what you want is its ability to recognize USB devices. I don't use Ghost, but someone else is sure to know. If not, I'm sure there is a Ghost forum online where you can find the answer. Or check the Ghost web site ... they may have the answer either in their FAQs or a support email address you can write.

 

It is possible, but depending on the laptop it can be a fiddle.

I'm still trying to get my computer to recognize my external hard drive under Dos, I think the issue is that the computer has a USB camera, so unfortunately the USB driver blows up (if I use USB 2.0) and just doesn't see the drive if I use the options to force USB 1.1.

Still working on it.

 

You might want to check out BartPE. It's a bootable CD you create using your Windows XP SP2 disk that runs a Windows environment. It recognizes USB devices and comes with image software (30 day trial). If it works, purchase the image software and update the BartPE with the unlocked software.

 

I use Norton Ghost with External USB drives (2.5" Enclosures from Vantec) and I have redone 3 hard drives in the last week without trouble. It runs fast too, but when I have it hooked up through a USB Hub it slows down. Get the HDDs and ghost if you want, they will work. Also, the Ghost CD can be used as a bootable disk to get to their recovery application so that you can recover the HDD in the computer from an external. I think Ghost does a good job.

 

Here's an update to my initial thread. I bought a USB 2.0 160 BG external Seagate from New Egg. It works flawlessly on both my desktop and notebook. I had no success doing a Ghost backup from my desktop to the external drive. For whatever reason, Ghost just won't recognize the external from the desktop. However, I managed to load up and run Ghost 2003 DOS from a Ghost boot cd onto the notebook, and it recognized the external hard drive. Every time it started to do a backup to the external, however, it would hang up. Turns out for some reason it could not create the backup file I named. I made a small "test.gho" file on the desktop and copied it over to the external. Then when reattempting to do Ghost backup from notebook, I told Ghost to over-write "test.gho" instead of creating a new file. Whalla! It worked, and I got a full backup of notebook "C" drive onto the external. Go figure. Anyway, I've ordered Ghost 9.0 from Ebay to get the full functionality.