| Description: | GHOST is designed to minimize the installation times for operating systems such as Win95, WinNT and OS/2. This is particularly useful to organizations 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. With multi access packages, multiple workstations may be installed at the same time which further improves efficiency. When cloning complete hard drives, procedures such as FDISK and FORMAT are a thing of the past - GHOST dynamically partitions and formats the target disk “on the fly” allowing FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS 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. Making GHOST a perfect choice for disaster recovery operations. Overview GHOST is essentially a disk and/or partition 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. GHOST also allows these operations to be performed on the partitions of the disk i.e. the contents of a partition can be copied to another partition, or selected partitions can be copied to an image file and that image file can be used as a template to create copies of the original partitions. Each disk is made up of a Master Boot Record and from 1 to 4 primary partitions. Primary partitions are physical separate areas of the disk, and are usually defined by the FDISK utility. Extended 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 when using GHOST. |