Using Ghost on a Macbook

joeyjoey
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Has anyone tried Ghosting their Macbook drive under XP using BootCamp? I know that Ghost makes a small virtual partition. I'm not sure if this would somehow screw up BootCamp. If it doesn't screw up BootCamp, would it be able to back up the OS X partition? I don't think it would be a problem since Ghost should just see it as data, regardless of the format... but I'm not sure. Any info that anyone might have would be helpful. I use Ghost for all my PCs... it would be convenient to have all my images in the same format.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    joeyjoey Posts: 236member
    ... bump



    Anyone? or maybe a utility other than Ghost that will backup the entire drive (preserving the BootCamp loader and both the XP and OS X partitions). Thanks again!
  • Reply 2 of 5
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    I use Ghost with a Linux + Windows XP dual boot, but that took some doing. I am using two drives, so that WIndows can have it's MBR, and I have GRUB take command at startup. The set up is not something I'd like to do again. . . Windows does not play well in a multi-boot environment.



    Ghost basically boots up a limited instance of Windows from the Ghost CD. I suppose there's no way to find out if it works without trying, although before doing so I'd back up my data. Ghost doesn't support any Mac HD formats, and it should just overlook those partitions (as it used to with my Reiser partitions before Symantec added Reiser "support"). You will need to be cautious, though, when concerning the two options "Restore MBR" and "Make this partition bootable." Chances are, you'll want to select the second and NOT the first, but I really have no idea.



    On the other hand, it might not be long before Disk Utility supports NTFS volumes. If that's the case, thene's no point to having Ghost. For those of you who are new to the mac, they have Ghost more or less built-in. It's a program called Disk Utility. You can use it to make disk images for Mac HD's among other things. You can also, hypothetically, use the unix program "dd" to do all these things, even potentially for NTFS, but that's ground I fear to tread. I've mucked up enough things with dd that I'll keep my distance unless utterly necessary.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    joeyjoey Posts: 236member
    I really don't use XP on my MacBook for anything. I pretty much just wanted to try out BootCamp "because I could".... and just in case something should come up where I need to use XP. Since I really don't use it much... I would imagine if I formatted my XP partition in FAT32, OS X Disk Utility would be able to back up the entire drive without a problem. Do you happen to know if the OS X Disk Utility maintains the integrity of the BootCamp boot loader (meaning if I restored an image from Disk Utility, I would still have the dual boot options)? Considering what I actually use XP for... I may just be better off going with Parallels and getting rid of the problem all together.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    leonardleonard Posts: 528member
    Ewwww Symantec. When you hear the name Symantec in the same thread as Mac, it's usually bad news. But then again, maybe Symantec's software on the PC side is a bit better than their Mac Software. On the Mac side we try to avoid Symantec software as it's buggy and often causes more problems then it's worth.



    I was trying to figure out what you were using Ghost for, cloning the HD, or backing it up? Mac users usually use Carbon Copy Cloner, or Super Duper, or the free Backup utility with .Mac. But I'm not sure if these would back up the NTFS partition. There's also Retrospect by Dantz (or EMC2 now), which has both Mac and Windows software, but I thinnk it has separate software for Mac/Windows. Your idea about going with a FAT32 partition and Disk Utility might work.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    joeyjoey Posts: 236member
    Yeah... in general... I try to stay away from Symantec programs for a PC as well... They're actually WORSE on a PC than a Mac because of all the registry crap. Their applications tentacles (and I said "tentacles") bury themselves in just about every part of your system. Ghost if pretty non-intrusive though (ver. 2003 or earlier). All you really need is the tiny Ghost.exe app on a floppy and it works fine. I've gotten rid of every other Symantec application on my system(s)
Sign In or Register to comment.