| Description: | Ghost is designed to minimize the installation times for operating systems such as Win95, WinNT and OS/2. This is particularly useful to organisations which have a large number of similarly configured workstations to install. For example, Ghost reduces the time to install a typical 300 Megabyte Win95 system from an hour with substantial operator input to about 5 minutes with no operator input required. In addition, multiple workstations may be installed at the same time which further improves efficiency. With Ghost tedious tasks such as FDISKing and FORMATing disks are a thing of the past - Ghost dynamically FDISKs and FORMATs the target disk, allowing FAT partitions to be expanded or contracted to fit the target. Ghost is designed to be run under DOS and can be run from a DOS boot diskette. Although DOS based it can handle Win95/WinNT long file names, NTFS partitions, OS/2 extended attributes and even OS/2 boot manager partitions. Ghost has two modes of operation - a simple, robust, menu driven user interface, and, to further aid automating the installation process, a batch mode. Prior to Win95 there was little need for a utility like Ghost as systems could be installed by simply using the DOS XCOPY command. Win95 introduced long file names, XCOPY could no longer do the job - hence the need for a utility like Ghost. Not only is Ghost the fastest way to install Win95, WinNT and OS/2, it has another handy use - it can make complete backups of disks, even copying “in-use” system files which are missed by other backup utilities. Overview Ghost is essentially a disk copying program. The entire contents of a disk may be copied from one disk to another, or they may be copied to a disk image file, and that image file can then be used as a template to create copies of the original disk. Each disk is made up of a Master Boot Record and from 1 to 4 primary partitions. Primary partitions are physically separate areas of the disk, and are usually defined by the FDISK utility. Primary partitions may be further subdivided into logical drives, once again using the FDISK utility. However, it is not important to understand the exact details of how a disk is subdivided. Ghost copies every partition, regardless of type, from the source (disk or disk -image file) to the destination. If the source and destination disks were identical in size and structure then all that would be needed is a sector by sector copy but in practice this is seldom the case. Ghost positions each partition or logical drive on the target disk using the same rules as FDISK. In addition, if the partition is a FAT type (90% are, the most common exceptions are NTFS and HPFS) Ghost allows the target partition to be expanded or contracted. |