Backup and Norton Ghost 2003

Although I am very familiar with desktop computers, this is my first notebook. Before I do anything I want to create an image backup with Ghost. This is easy on a desktop with two hard drives. I am having difficulty with only 1 hard drive. I have managed to backup to DVD but this is very slow. I have an external fairly new Maxtor external drive. It will not backup using the USB 2 drivers but will using the USB 1.1 drivers. I do not understand this. The notebook does not have a floppy drive and I see no way to create a bootable CD or DVD startup disk. Any help with this?

Thank you.

 

Check your BIOS to ensure that USB 2.0 is enabled and make sure the model of the laptop has USB 2.0 ports
Otherwise you could check for an updated driver if it does / updates / patches to Norton ghost 2003

 

This is a new Sony with a Phoenix BIOS. The BIOS is very simplistic and does not have an option to enable USB 2.0 ports. Since it is new it seems unlikely to me that they are not 2.0. One problem with the notebook is that I have no idea what hardware is installed. I have been to the Symantec site but since 2003 is an older product, it seems to lack support. I bought Norton Ghost 10 which included 2003. After buying Norton 10, it seems to have such poor reviews.

I decided to create a new partition of the hard drive for backups. Although this will not help in the case of a hard drive failure, it will help if the C: drive is corrupted. I can then do periodic backups to the external Maxtor hard drive and DVDs.

How do most people backup their notebooks?

Thanks again.

 

http://www.netbootdisk.com/bootcd.htm

Boot this CD and create network drives before running ghost. Then you'd be able to ghost to the networked drive on another machine, although this may not be much faster than USB 1.1 speed.

 

You could also try Acronis; it can create a separate partition (like the default manufacture ones) and give you the option to boot from it every time you start up.