RE: [IMail Forum] O.T. Mailserver Drive Migration best Practices

[Dan Horne]

I know I'm a bit late on this topic, but this has recently become relevant to me and I have been testing various versions of Ghost to try and move a Windows2k3 server to a different hard drive.  Here is what I have found: Ghost 2001 (which runs from a DOS boot disk) will not copy a Windows 2003 drive, claiming that the source drive is write protected.  I do not know if this is a limitation of Ghost 2001 or a problem with the specific drive I'm trying to Ghost, but I suspect the former.  Ghost 9 (and 10) installs to Windows desktop OS's only, and does not run from a boot disk.  The Ghost CD is a boot disk that includes various system recovery tools, but drive copying is not one of them.  It does allow you to restore an image that was previously made.  Ghosting the drives is done from within Windows.  Therefore Ghost 9 and up only support copying Windows desktop OS's (Win2k and XP basically).  They basically crippled the Ghost product in two ways: 1) formerly it didn't care what OS you were running, if it could detect the drive it could copy it sector by sector.  It is now Windows only (and no servers either). 2) by doing the copy while Windows is running, you are no longer guaranteed that "nothing will change" while copying the drive.  Previously the OS you were copying wouldn't even be running, so you could ensure that the destination drive had the exact same contents as the source drive.  That is no longer the case.   So the long and short of it is that Ghost now works more like an online backup than a disk imaging tool. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Matt Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 7:48 PM To: IMail_Forum@list.ipswitch.com Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] O.T. Mailserver Drive Migration best Practices Sandy, I would be surprised to see a boot disk executable such as ghost.exe care about what was on the disk, and I wasn't commenting on the EULA's, but Powerquest/Symantec does prevent installations of regular versions of their products from being installed on Windows Server despite the software being mostly the same at the core (and the server version won't install on a workstation if you can believe it).  I did note that they were purposefully feature limited.  I believe, though I haven't confirmed this, that Ghost will not install on a Windows Server, but that wouldn't prevent you from cloning a disk as I pointed out. Matt Sanford Whiteman wrote: Thanks for all the great advise everyone! While pricing Ghost 10.0, I noted that the OS requirements for Win2000 specifies "Professional Only". What version have you used successfully with 2000 Server? GHOST.EXE, the component you run from a boot disk for disk-to-disk cloning, is compatible with server partitions. I'm not offering any comment as to the EULA, but Matt's claims about the hardware-specificity of these products don't ring true. What constitutes a "server," when we have SATA servers and SCSI workstations? In 10 years of using disk imaging, I've never known any such product to make _any_ judgments on this level, since it's impossible. Now, it is technically possible to peek into partitions to determine the primary OS, but I am very experienced in the use of PowerQuest DriveImage's workstation version (now folded into Ghost), and it does no such validation when using its disk-to-disk cloning PQDI.EXE component. The server vs. workstation licensing models, rather, are only enforced when trying to install the GUI-based modules: the image inspectors/browsers, "live" imaging functions, image schedulers, etc. You do not need to spend $700 to clone your server disk. Don't. --Sandy ------------------------------------ Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist Broadleaf Systems, a division of Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc. e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SpamAssassin plugs into Declude! http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/SPAMC32/download/release/ Defuse Dictionary Attacks: Turn Exchange or IMail mailboxes into IMail Aliases! http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/exchange2aliases/download/release/ http://www.imprimia.com/products/software/freeutils/ldap2aliases/download/release/ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/