norton Ghost VS XP's system restore

system restore doesnt take up that much space but sometimes with all of the computer killing things out there u cant get into windows at all to restore. ur best bet though costly, is to get another hard drive of the same size or at least bigger than the used portion of your current hard drive, then with norton you can create an exact replica of your hard drive the way it is and if any problems arise you can just boot form your ghosted drive and your back where you started no problems. thats just my opinion though i keep a dormant hard drive in my system just for that purpose and every once in a while i update my ghosted drive.

thanks for the good advice.

out of interest do you keep the hard disk plugged into your machine all the time - i'm just thinking of how to protect from power surges or someone stealing my pc...

His suggestion of backing up using ghost to a totally separate HD is a great idea if you dont mind the cost. Saves for activation hassles and updating, etc. Keep the second drive tucked away in a static bag and hope you don't have to use it.

i just remember around a year ago i was trying to ghost my os, but i got stuck because i am using a sata drive. trouble was that ghost wanted to restore the entire hard disk but i only wanted just a single partition. when restoring a ghost image using a boot disk i couldn't get it to recognise the partitions. as far as i remember.

any ideas?

If the ghost image was created from a drive without partitions or with different partitions than what you are restoring to, it will fail :-\\

that's ok - so long as it doesn't format the whole drive before restoring