Questions about norton ghost

Question

I have used norton ghost to backup my hard drive. And it came up with a .v2i file.

1. Will I be able to use this backup from my pc to my laptop?
2. Can I use this backup to restore my dual boot pc back in shape. If the mbr is destroyed/damaged?
3. Can I use this backup to restore my os and applications on the same machine if the machine's hard drive is reformatted?

Answer 1

I know this is an old thread, however the amount of Linux users is increasing, therefore dual booting is getting to be quite popular again... so I'm just throwing a lil info out there...

Norton is capable of backing of Windows and Linux on a dual-boot system, however do be careful. Ghost operates at a low level in the regard, therefore it can be dangerous.

An example of operation:: Norton Ghost 14: (From the CD) Restoring a single partition appears to not work all too well with a logical disk, formatted as ext3. As it appears when Ghost calculates the size of the image, Ghost 'can' (not always) think where it's attempting to be restored back to is too small, and get an error "Error EC950006: "Destination drive is not valid" when nothing on the HDD has changed in the regard to partitioning. I'm not sure how Ghost is calculating to determine such things, however Ghost does work on dual boot systems, just keep Windows running, or perform a System Restore getting the partition table, and Windows, then restore Linux from within Windows using the installed application.
-- To me this is quite a limitation

What you may also do:
Mainly for Windows:
1: Use Norton to Backup the Drive - Therefore this gives you a solid point of recovery in case of Drive Failure. This can be a pita to recover from though, however the Windows portion will work. You will have a solid copy of Windows, and Linux.

In regards to the Linux data:
2a: Just rsync the data from one machine to another - Be sure to rsync the data to another system which is running the same FS, such as Linux box being copied to another Linux box (ext3 to ext3 - DO NOT DO:: ext3 to NTFS).
2b: Create a *tar.bz2 of the data on the Linux Partitions, and drop it on another box, or NAS for safe keeping...

-- After the recovery of the Linux data which should pertain to formatting the drives necessary, extract the backup data from the backup file to the drive thus restoring the Linux partion.
-- Assuming you use Grub for your boot loader, be sure to boot to a live CD, or whatever, mount, and chroot into the environment to reinstall grub or you may not have the option to boot Linux, depending on the system configuration of course...