Ghost is a stunning program-I use it almost daily. You need to make either a PC boot disk, or a “Boot CD” with Ghost on it. I use both methods-the CD is made with “Bart PE”, by far the most useful CD I’ve seen in recent times.
For ghosting “stand alone” PC’s I recommend using a CD Rewriter, creating a normal PC boot disk, and copying the ghost.exe program file onto it. Version 7 onwards supports direct writing to CD, without needing drivers to use the burner itself.
Basically, boot the PC from the floppy disk, and run ghost.exe, or ghostpe.exe, depending on which you have.
From the menu, Choose “Local”, “Disk”, and “To image”. This will bring up the drive select dialog-if you have more than one drive, pick the one you want ghosted. Click OK.
Click the “Look in” box, and drop it down. You should see your CD burner (or other disk drive-see below) listed. If not, you might need to install CD drivers on your floppy disk. I use Ghost 7.5 Corporate edition, and I’ve never had any issues.
ALTERNATIVELY, if you have more than 1 hard disk inside your PC (note disk, NOT partition), you can choose to ghost the one disk to a file on the other. Your choice, just make sure if you do, that you don’t delete it!
Name the image whatever you wish to name it, give it a description if you wish, and click “save”. Ghost will prompt you to choose a file compression level-”none” is fastest, “High” is slowest, but results in the smallest image.
Choose Proceed when prompted, and watch Ghost do it’s stuff. With a bit of luck, it’ll run fine, and you’ll only be prompted to change CD’s as it fills them up if you opted to create to a CD ReWiter. When it’s done, you’ll be prompted to reboot your PC. By all means, do so. Windows will restart and then you need to go and reset that swapfile to “system managed size”.
If you wish to test your image (recommended!), Follow the same procedure to start Ghost, but this time choose “Local”, “Disk”, “FROM File”,and put in your CD, then pick the CD drive as your image source (or hard disk, if you chose that. This will restore your image onto that PC, and you can then restart it and check it out.
NOTE:This ghost image will most likely ONLY work on your PC..NOT any others. Also, if you have a catastrophic hardware failure such as the motherboard going bad, and you change it, the image may not work with the new hardware. If this bothers you, you can use the SYSPREP method before you ghost, to make it a bit more flexible.