"Barry Delfino" said in news:
[email protected]:
Powerquest claims DriveImage supports RAID 0. DriveImage creates
physical image files in that it reads the sectors from the hard disk.
It also skips the unused sectors (so they are not recorded in the
image file but just tracked). At one time, I got Norton Systemworks
2002 Pro which included Ghost so I tested it for awhile but found it
had some nasty deficiencies mentioned below (but most can be overcome
with command-line switches). If DriveImage supports recovery to RAID
0 then I would suspect so would Ghost. I went back to DriveImage.
Problems I had with Norton Ghost:
- It boots using IBM MS-DOS (that was the included DOS). IBM DOS is
known for not being as hardware compatible as MS-DOS; i.e., there are
some hardware configurations that will be flaky under IBM DOS (and
mine was one of them apparently). You can create an image of a
bootable floppy made with another DOS, like MS-DOS, and store that so
Ghost will then use that when it creates a bootable floppy. However,
you then have to buy another operating system since NT-based versions
of Windows don't bother to include plain MS-DOS on a bootable floppy,
and that requirement is not mentioned in the product. At the time, I
didn't know about
http://www.bootdisk.com to obtain images of MS-DOS
(and which Microsoft knows about and even recommends in one of the KB
articles). DriveImage uses CalderaDOS with which I've had no
problems across 3 home PCs.
- Ghost defaults to a logical read of the disk when writing its image
file. That means it has to open files. I had EFS (encrypted file
system) used to protect some data directories. On a restore, and
because the files are being read (instead of just reading the binary
contents of a sector), the restore would fail on the EFS-protected
files. I had to remove EFS, create the image, do the restore or
clone, and then reinstantiate EFS. Sucks royal.
- There is a command-line switch (I think it is -IA) that switches
ghost from logical reading to physical reading of the drive (so it
then operates more like DriveImage). However, there is no
command-line switch to also have it skip empty, or unused, sectors
from the image file. So the image file was far larger compared
against what I got with DriveImage. You'll end up consuming far more
CDs to store Ghost's physical image file.
That was 2 versions ago with Ghost. Perhaps Symantec has enhanced
their product since then. I doubt it. Symantec is a large software
predator consuming software companies, like Norton and now Powerquest
(so I fear for PartitionMagic's and DriveImage's future quality and
survivability). Everything Symantec buys then wanes over the years.
That's why I doubt there has been significant improvement in Ghost
over the last couple years. Might be why they decided to eat up
Powerquest.
You might want to throws a pre-sales e-mail at Powerquest, er,
Symantec, to see if Ghost will handle RAID 0 drive configurations
(using an image file created in a non-RAID configuration). I didn't
find any appropriate KB articles at Symantec's web site when
selecting "Ghost 2003" as the product and version and searching on
"RAID clone". I did find their KB article at
http://snipurl.com/5ak6
which says, "Symantec Ghost 8.0 and earlier, and Norton Ghost 2003
and earlier, do not support RAID controllers". Norton Ghost 2003 is
the latest "personal" version. There is a "Symantec" or corporation
of ghost and maybe it supports RAID but I doubt you want to pay for
their corporate version. See, I told you all Symantec products wane.
Symantec is a software publisher (i.e., predator), not a developer.
That's why I fear for Powerquest's products now that Symantec bought
Powerquest.
