Freeware ghost alternative

[flyingrhino]

Does anyone know of a freeware alternative to norton ghost ?
I'm looking for a program that boots off dos (or it's own system) and can handle winXP partitions. I know there are some freeware linux based solutions but they do a sector by sector copy of the partition and using it on an 80GB disk with only 1Gb of data ends up with a very big dumpfile.

[ston]

Try Partition Saving. It appears to be everything that you are looking for. It is a DOS program that is highly rated on "best of" freeware sites like www.pricelessware.org

http://www.partition-saving.com/

I have not used it myself because it does not have the features that I need.

Norton Ghost has not been updated in a long time, and it is my suspicion that they are working on rewriting an all-new version, because any DOS-based application like Ghost will have increasing serious drawbacks, compared to a Linux-based boot program like Acronis True Image. The DOS utilities like Ghost and Partition Saving will slowly die out because almost no one is writing DOS drivers for new hardware and new protocols - for instance USB 2.0 or SATA cardbus ("pcmcia") expansion cards - while at the same time Linux drivers for new hardware are soon written by many independent programmers.

I was just about to try Acronis True Image, then yesterday I discovered that it was recalled from store shelves - I need to look into why this was.

Just my own preference, but I prefer to use a commercial, supported application for something as serious as disk imaging, rather than using a freeware app that may be updated or debugged only rarely. Otherwise, freeware is usually my first consideration.

[flyingrhino]

Thanks, I checked out the site and I will follow your advice and try the Acronis software.

[natan770]

Hi;
you might also give a try to PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost), a 100%-opensource alternative to Ghost.
Get it here: http://ping.windowsdream.com .

Natan

[enter8]

Free Partition Editors, Managers and Recovery (Partitioning Software)

Out of this list, I think Ranish is the most respected.

This being said... I've put in a considerable amount of time researching this and have found partitioning disks where the OS is already installed a sketchy endeavor, regardless of whether the software is commercial or free. Quite a few people get lucky and it works, but a handful don't. The process doesn't give me much of a warm fuzzy feeling.

If I needed to change the partitions on my drive, I might burn my documents to DVD, erase the drive (with a zero fill), create my partitions from scratch (using my HD software) and then re-install my applications/copy back my docs. This might be overkill, but I've read too many stories of people trying to change the partitions on their disks and strange things occurring.

[drtoker]

if you can find ghost.exe, you can put it on a dos boot floppy and just run it from the dos prompt. We had an old copy of ghost, lost it, but still had this exe, so that solved our problem.