Rating: 
Summary: Disk Image much better
Review: ...I have not been able to get ghost to work. I'm using a P4 1.5ghz 256mb ram...with a 16X CD-RW. Gives an error message after burning about 2% of the disk. The solutions on Norton's site gave some things to try, none of which worked. I bought Disk Image 5.0, and it worked on the first attempt.
Rating:
Summary: Suggested Name Change -> Ghost 2002 LITE
Review: Background Information
- Intended use was in a small business scenario.
- Three machines, networked together.
- Desire to backup drive images to a networked machine.This product is really limited. I happen to not have a FAT or FAT32 drive on any of my machines, and therefore cannot create an image of a drive and store it on a networked machine. Also, having to type in the serial number everytime you want to perform any work is a feature I'm used to in shareware....only problem is, I remember paying for this coffee coaster. I'm definitely going to look for an alternative product.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Overall But A Few Things missing from the manual
Review: First off, I am a computer geek so I didn't have much trouble getting around some issues that came up which were not covered in the manual. For me, the program is easy to use and seems to work fine for my needs - simply backing up my personal drive. I would not recommend any imaging software to the timid. You should have a basic knowledge of hard drive partitions before touching this type of software. Here's what I'm doing: I am backing up my primary 13GB IDE drive to my secondary 40GB IDE drive. All of my programs reside on my primary. The secondary drive is strictly for backups and media files (MP3, AVI, QuickTime, etc.)- nothing that needs to be backed up. I am running Windows 98. The Ghost image files have a limit of 2GB. When a 2GB image file has been created (within my setup), Ghost will say that my drive is full and needs to continue on a new disk. There's still 13GB available on that partition (on my 40GB drive) so I know the drive isn't full. It doesn't say in the manual but just selecting OK is all that needs to be done to continue. At first, I thought this was an issue because I let Ghost create a PC-DOS boot disk. It happened with a Win98 boot disk so I finally studied the manual more closely and discovered the 2GB file limit. Ghost is not able to make a bootable disk using a Win98 boot diskette. Ghost includes PC-DOS to make bootable disks for different needs such as CD-ROM support. Since I don't need my CD-ROM for this, I just made a Win98 boot disk and copied GHOSTPE to the floppy so I could have full FAT32 support - just in case. In response to the reviewer who wanted the manual to have instructions for changing BIOS settings, that is not easy to do. Although there are a few primary BIOS manufacturers, PC manufacturers often customize the BIOS. There are multiple, possible ways simple settings could be changed on a PC. There is no real standard. This isn't for the Mac. Overall, I felt Ghost does what it claims it will. The manual is incomplete. More items need to be covered there. I had to figure out too much on my own. For Windows NT 4.0 users, nothing is said about the SID in the manual. I don't know if you'll need to search for additional software to create a unique SID for each Win NT PC. Ghost works well for my own personal needs, and I like it more than the backup software included with Windows.
Rating: 
Summary: Could Have been a Great Product
Review: Ghost has great potential but there are still bugs to be ironed out. I tested it on a Windows 98 system and a Windows XP system. The test was to backup my systems to CD-R's. The backups worked flawlessly but the Integrity Check to verify the backups, told me my CDs contained errors and that I had to start all over again. Also, Ghost caused my Windows 98 system to lock up repeatedly to the point way I had to re-install the operating system.
Rating:
Summary: Could Have been a Great Product
Review: Ghost has great potential but there are still bugs to be ironed out. I tested it on a Windows 98 system and a Windows XP system. The test was to backup my systems to CD-R's. The backups worked flawlessly but the Integrity Check to verify the backups, told me my CDs contained errors and that I had to start all over again. Also, Ghost caused my Windows 98 system to lock up repeatedly to the point way I had to re-install the operating system.
Rating: 
Summary: For HD to HD backup, Ghost is the ticket!
Review: Ghost is not for the timid, and I think the concept of Ghost may be confusing to people who are unfamiliar with a DOS prompt, or command line switches. It also doesn't help that Ghost is a little unfriendly to GUI people (Windows Only Users). I've used Ghost for a long time, and like others discovered previous versions of Ghost were not compatible with Windows XP. A further frustration is Norton System Works 2002 is also incompatible with previous versions of Ghost. So I set out to get Ghost 2002 and stumbled onto these reviews which was more then a little unnerving, even for a techie. I finnally broke down and bought it, and I'm a happy (Backed up) camper again. But I had a problem that might help somebody else. The default boot disk Ghost made did not work with NTFS, so I had to make a bootable floppy under Win XP, then select 'GET MS-DOS' (while making a Ghost disk), which Ghost will store in it's own folder for making future boot disks with MS-DOS, opposed to the default incompatible PC-DOS. Ghost 2002 is much faster then previous versions, and the Ghost.ini file allows customization of all the program defaults if no command line switches are used. I use this program solely for backing up (Disk Images) to other internal hard drives, and I don't know of a faster, more cost effective solution to this, then Ghost.
Rating:
Summary: For HD to HD backup, Ghost is the ticket!
Review: Ghost is not for the timid, and I think the concept of Ghost may be confusing to people who are unfamiliar with a DOS prompt, or command line switches. It also doesn't help that Ghost is a little unfriendly to GUI people (Windows Only Users). I've used Ghost for a long time, and like others discovered previous versions of Ghost were not compatible with Windows XP. A further frustration is Norton System Works 2002 is also incompatible with previous versions of Ghost. So I set out to get Ghost 2002 and stumbled onto these reviews which was more then a little unnerving, even for a techie. I finnally broke down and bought it, and I'm a happy (Backed up) camper again. But I had a problem that might help somebody else. The default boot disk Ghost made did not work with NTFS, so I had to make a bootable floppy under Win XP, then select 'GET MS-DOS' (while making a Ghost disk), which Ghost will store in it's own folder for making future boot disks with MS-DOS, opposed to the default incompatible PC-DOS. Ghost 2002 is much faster then previous versions, and the Ghost.ini file allows customization of all the program defaults if no command line switches are used. I use this program solely for backing up (Disk Images) to other internal hard drives, and I don't know of a faster, more cost effective solution to this, then Ghost.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe it'll work for your computer, maybe not
Review: Ghost is not only cumbersome to use (two seperate boot floppies for CD-writing and CD-reading operations!?), but surprisingly spotty for a DOS application. Even Symantec's support site admits a long line of possible hardware compatibility problems with not only CD-RW drives, but with CD-R disks themselves! Although Ghost will record backups on 700MB CD-Rs on my computer with no problem, it has great difficulty reading off of those 700MB CD-Rs afterwards. It works okay with 640MB CD-Rs, but since those are becoming increasingly scarce, I will have to opt for much slower backups on 640MB CD-RWs. Bottom line: if you buy this tool and backup on 700MB CD-Rs, you better verify the backup afterwards. Symantec makes a lot of great products; Norton Ghost is not one of them.
Rating:
Summary: Urgent Quotation
Review: Hi, please send me a quotation for the Norton Ghost 2002 or for the best disk imaging product that you would advise me to use on the local network. Waiting for an urgent response. regards,
Flo
Rating:
Summary: Crippleware
Review: I bought Ghost based on my experience with using the corporate edition at work. However, the home edition is severely limited compared to the corporate edition. The biggest problem I had was that the home edition doesn't allow writing to a network drive. I have a big server machine on my home network, and I'd like to just dump images of the hard drives of the other machines to it. Ghost 2002 doesn't allow this. It's worse than just Ghost 2002 not supporting it; it can write an image to a drive letter, so it should be able to write to a mapped network drive as well. It actually checks to see if it's a network drive, and refuses to write to it if it is. Deliberately crippling the operation this way is unacceptable to me, so I got a refund. The only way to get the ability to write to a network drive is to buy the corporate edition, which has a 10 license minimum. If Symantec sold a single-license "Ghost Pro" that had most of the abilities of the corporate edition, I'd buy that. But they don't. I ended up getting Powerquest's Drive Image, which does allow network drives.
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