I have a few questions about Norton Ghost. 1. How the hell do I use it. 2. If 321 studios got into an awful lot of trouble by producing copying software then what about the possibilities offered by Norton Ghost. My mate (yes i've got one) builds computers in a computer shop. To save a lot of time he installed XP and other software on a new computer's hard drive and then took a ghost image of it. Now every time he builds a new computer he installs the ghost image onto the hard drive. I takes about a quarter of the time compared to installing the programs separately. The xp registration issue isn't a problem here as they have the corporate disc which allows them to install it into as many computers as they want. But for anyone not in the trade wouldn't this be open to abuse? I could do a clean install of xp, Nero, office etc, then clone it with ghost and copy it to every new computer I build. And do the same for all my friends and neighbours etc. There would be no problems with programs not accepting serial numbers as they have already been installed on the original image. I have Norton Ghost but I just never figured out how to use it.(Do I need a boot disc or not?) Any opinions on this?
It's purpose is for large scale identical deplyments. Key is the hardware have to be identical enough for this to work.
Hi sdifox, we know it works, the question was what are your opinions regarding ghost being used for piracy when other companies are in trouble for it. With ghost you can pirate a load of programs at once and yet nothing is said.
321 got into trouble by decrypting copy protections, the DVD CSS. Ghost doesn't decrypt any protection like 321 did. In theory it could be used for piracy but in practice it wouldn't be very large scale. Everyone would have to have identical hardware. Also some protections rely on hardware id's such as the Activation requirements for XP. I would guess that it would see that the hardware id's did not match the image and activation would fail since the hard drive, maotherboard, etc would have different hardware id's or serial nubmers even if the hardware was identical. As far as using it, just install it, run it from windows, and make your image. If you have to do a restore and can't get into windows you will need a boot disk but I believe it will prompt to create one for you during the installation or first run.
Thanks for the reply Xian. I like to wipe the hard drive and do a fresh re-install every couple of months to get rid of all the rubbish. So my plan is, on the next re-install, to install xp and all my other favourite programs, run registry mechanic and defrag the drive, and then ghost the image so that next time I do a fresh install it will only take about twenty minutes instead of a couple of hours. Will this work?
That should work fine. Thats what I do. I create a baseline image with the OS and internet apps then when I need to restore I am back up in minutes. I go a step farther, I make a 10 gig partition to hold my OS and most used apps. I put all my data files and games on a second partition. I only back up the first partition since it has the OS and the registry. Most everything on the 2nd partition will work even after a restore unless it is something added after the image was created and it requires a registry entry or custom DLLs. By making the 10 gig partition I can turn compression on in Ghost and get the entire thing on a single DVD-R instead of having to span multiple discs.
I tried partitioning my hard drive once and made a right old cock up of it. But I will try try ghosting the drive now that you told me it works. Cheers Xian
as long as you have the required licenses for both the master and the target, the software companies that own the respective copyrights don't care how you load the software onto the computer.
