Ghost Recovery Software
Marie Ota
I have been told that restoring a ghost image onto an SSD is bad for the SSD because it corrupts the memory blocks on the SSD and that the best approach for putting data (such as an OS) on an SSD is to do a fresh install.
If it is Win-XP even a clean install will be off and should be realigned before use.
XP will also not automatically turn off indexing, prefetching and the other things that Win 7 does.
You will save some life on the SSD.
Imaging or Ghost programs such as Symantec Norton Ghost are often used to make identical or near-identical hard disk copies. This copy can then be used as a backup or to transfer a system onto another hard drive.
Incorrect operation and use of Ghosting programs may lead to severe consequences. The data previously held on the hard disk to receive the image will often be completely overwritten. This is not always the case, though, as sometimes the disk receiving the image may be considerably larger than the original disk.
Ghosting to a disk of this type will almost certainly destroy the file system and root directory structure. However, some of the previously recovered data on the hard disk may still be recoverable. Other problems exist, too, such as Ghosting in the wrong direction, unexpected program termination, or system crash due to program defects or problems on one or more hard disks (e.g., due to bad sectors, etc.)
Instead, if you find some reliable ghost recovery software, things can be much easier. EaseUS data recovery software is recommended as the most dependable ghost data recovery software for all brands of hard drives, such as Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, etc.
Download EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for free to recover lost data from a ghost disk/partition. You can use the EaseUS Ghost recovery software to recover as many file types as you want, including media files, image files, PDF files, text files, emails, and so on.
Destiny 2 has had new ghost mods in the game for two years now after a dramatic rework to the system that first arrived in November of 2020. They include things like increased glimmer and XP gains, bonus playlist rewards and most pressingly, the ability to target focus armor stats.
Destiny 2 splits stats into two pools, mobility, resilience and recovery and then discipline, intellect and strength. A while ago, really the only stats anyone cared all that much about were recovery and intellect (minus some Hunters), which later became recovery and discipline. But now with the resilience buff where tier 10 gives you 40% damage resistance, you now want both recovery and resilience. As high as you can get in both, ideally.
I have a Norton Ghost full drive backup from a couple months before the crash. I have built a new machine, but it has a different motherboard than the old one. (New machine is an ASUS P8-Z77 MB with a Core i5/socket 1155 processor. The old one was a GigaBYTE motherboard from about 4 years ago, with a Core i7/socket 1366 processor.)
I would like to be able to use the Ghost backup as a starting point for this machine so that I don't have to re-install/re-configure all my apps. However, it's seeming to be a case of you can't get there from here.
When I restore the drive, and do the startup repair from Windows install disk to regenerate the boottrack and Boot Manager, the machine will begin to start up, and gets about 2 seconds into the splash screen (where the colored dots are beginning to come together into the logo), then reboots. I've tried it in safe mode, and it goes through about a screen full of DLL's that it's loading, then just stops and reboots. I've got the driver installation disk that came with the new motherboard, but I can't figure out a way to use it to install the drivers on the system disk if I can't at least get safe mode up.
Any suggestions, or am I just going to have to start from a clean install and re-pave the whole machine. (I know that since everything is backed up on the Norton image, I'll be able to recover all my data, it's just a matter of convenience.)
Personally, I would not try to restore using the Ghost image. You'll be introducing foreign drivers and device settings which will probably make your task much more difficult. Instead, I would do a clean install of the OS, install Ghost, and then MOUNT the previous Ghost image to extract anything useful or to jog your memory of what you had installed.
On a side note, you may want to look at using WinInstall (free) and package your installs while you are going through this process. WinInstall lets you take a "snapshot" of the machine before you install an app and then, again, after you install / register / tweak each application. It then creates an MSI package with all of the app's install files, any tweaks you may have made to the app, and any registration information. If you ever run into this scenario again, or even need to MOVE your app to another machine, you can just execute the MSI file to get the app onto the machine with almost no effort. If you do this for each of the apps during your upcoming process you will never have to worry whether or not your have the exact hardware during a recovery... just install the OS, execute a series of quiet MSIs, and then bring in your data.
GHOST is marketed as an OS deployment solution. Its capture and deployment environment requires booting to a Windows PE environment. This can be accomplished by creating an ISO (to burn to a DVD) or a USB bootable disk, installed to a client as an automation folder or delivered by a PXE server. This provides an environment to perform offline system recovery or image creation. GHOST can mount a backup volume to recover individual files.
Initially, GHOST supported only the FAT file system but could copy (not resize) other file systems by performing a sector-by-sector transfer. GHOST added support for NTFS later in 1996, and also provided a program, Ghostwalker, to change the Security ID (SID) that made Windows NT systems distinguishable from each other. Ghostwalker is capable of modifying the name of the Windows NT computer from its own interface. GHOST added support for the EXT2 file system in 1999 and for EXT3 subsequently. Support for EXT4 was added in September 2017 (Enterprise only).
Binary Research developed GHOST in Auckland, New Zealand. After the Symantec acquisition, a few functions (such as translation into other languages) were moved elsewhere, but the main development remained in Auckland until October 2009 at which time much was moved to India.[citation needed]
GHOST 1.0 and 1.1 were released in 1996, followed by 2.0 (2.07) in the same year. These versions supported only the cloning of entire disks. They could run on an IBM XT and without extended memory. They also worked with OS/2.[7]
Version 3.1, released in 1997 supports cloning individual partitions. GHOST could clone a disk or partition to another disk or partition or to an image file. GHOST allows for writing a clone or image to a second disk in the same machine, another machine linked by a parallel or network cable, a network drive, or to a tape drive. 3.1 uses 286 with XMS and could still run on OS/2.[7]
Version 4.0 of GHOST added multicast technology, following the lead of a competitor, ImageCast. Multicasting supports sending a single backup image simultaneously to other machines without putting greater stress on the network than by sending an image to a single machine. This version also introduced GHOST Explorer, a Windows program which supports browsing the contents of a disk image file and extracting individual files from it. Explorer was subsequently enhanced to support adding and deleting files in a FAT-formatted image, and later with EXT2, EXT3 and NTFS file systems. Until 2007, GHOST Explorer could not edit NTFS images. GHOST Explorer could work with images from older versions but only slowly; version 4 images contain indexes to find files rapidly.
Version 4.0 also moved from real-mode DOS to 286 protected mode via Pharlap Extender.[7] The additional memory available allows GHOST to provide several levels of compression for images, and to provide the file browser. In 1998, GHOST 4.1 supports password-protected images. This version dropped OS/2 support.[7]
Version 5.0 moved to 386 protected mode. Unlike the text-based user interface of earlier versions, 5.0 uses a graphical user interface (GUI). The Binary Research logo, two stars revolving around each other, plays on the main screen when the program is idle.[7] In 1998, Gdisk, a script-based partition manager, was integrated in Ghost. Gdisk serves a role similar to Fdisk, but has greater capabilities.
GHOST 6.0, released in 2000, includes a management console for managing large numbers of machines. The console communicates with client software on managed computers and allows a system administrator to refresh the disk of a machine remotely. As a DOS-based program, GHOST requires machines running Windows to reboot to DOS to run it. GHOST 6.0 requires a separate DOS partition when used with the console.[8]
Released December 14, 2001, GHOST 7.5 creates a virtual partition, a DOS partition which actually exists as a file within a normal Windows file system. This significantly eased systems management because the user no longer had to set up their own partition tables. GHOST 7.5 can write images to CD-R discs. Later versions can write DVDs.
The off-line version of Ghost, which runs from bootable media in place of the installed operating system, originally faced a number of driver support difficulties due to limitations of the increasingly obsolete 16-bit DOS environment. Driver selection and configuration within DOS was non-trivial from the beginning, and the limited space available on floppy disks made disk cloning of several different disk controllers a difficult task, where different SCSI, USB, and CD-ROM drives were involved. Mouse support was possible but often left out due to the limited space for drivers on a floppy disk. Some devices such as USB often did not work using newer features such as USB 2.0, instead only operating at 1.0 speeds and taking hours to do what should have taken only a few minutes. As widespread support for DOS went into decline, it became increasingly difficult to get hardware drivers for DOS for the newer hardware.
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