Removing Grub for Ghost image?

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Scott R Ehrlich wrote:
> Symantec's web site states that Ghost 2003 (what I have) will NOT
> work  with Grub.
> 
> ...performed an fdisk /mbr...so Grub apparently had been removed.
> 
> What else could I be missing to fully remove Grub and permit Ghost to
> work?

You're removing your boot loader and reinstalling one of your OSs just 
so you can use Ghost? Is there some reason why you need to use Ghost 
that badly? There are plenty of alternative imaging programs, including 
several that are open source.

I've used the SystemRescueCd[1] bootable Linux distribution for imaging 
and partitioning. It includes Partimage[2], which I've found to be less 
than reliable when imaging NTFS partitions, but recent versions of 
SystemRescueCd include ntfsclone, part of the ntfsprogs[3] package. It's 
a command line tool for imaging NTFS partitions and will intelligently 
skip unused space (if you enable that option). It's quite fast, too.

(ntfsprogs also includes ntfsresize[4], which is the tool used by most 
open source partitioning tools (QtParted[5], GParted[6], etc.) to resize 
NTFS partitions.)

If I want to image an entire disk, or Linux partitions, it's hard to 
beat dd. dd can also be used to backup the MBR, and sfdisk can be used 
to backup the partition table[7].

It's been a long tine since I last tried Ghost, and the reason I did was 
that it promised it could store images on network drives. It turned out 
that feature was a joke - requiring DOS packet drivers and only 
supporting the most common networking hardware, and even worse, not 
supporting network file systems (I think you ran a copy of Ghost in 
"server mode" on another machine). Writing to network drives using any 
of several protocols is, of course, almost trivial with Linux.

One place where some of the commercial imaging tools have an edge is the 
ability to store images on NTFS partitions. Write support to NTFS as 
bundled with SystemRescueCd is still a pain, requiring the use of native 
Windows drivers. Newer open source NTFS drivers should solve this 
limitation in the future. Until then, I've found it best to set up 
shared data drives using ext2 and then use a freeware ext2 driver[8] on 
the Windows side.

1. http://www.sysresccd.org/
2. http://partimage.org/
3. http://www.linux-ntfs.org/
4. http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html
5. http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/
6. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
7. http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#cli
    (scroll down for MBR and partition table backup instructions)
8. http://www.fs-driver.org/

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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