WinXP on FAT32 Drive

[rwinegar]

I am going to install an 80GB FAT 32 external hard drive. I plan to use Ghost to clone my main hard drive over to the external for backup purposes. I think WinXP will only operate from an NFTS formatted drive. In an emergency would I be able to boot to the FAT32 drive and run XP?

[Limerick]

Hi Rwinegar,

I'm running XP Pro just fine on a FAT32 drive. If you clone your NTFS drive over to the external FAT32 drive, it will become NTFS. That is, Ghost will completely overwrite what is currently on the external drive with what is on the XP drive. Is that what you are desiring to see happen?

Limerick

[rwinegar]

Thanks Limerick.

I do not really know what I am desiring. I was simply looking to use the 80GB external drive as storage and backup. If cloning XP to the FAT 32 drive will reformat it to NFTS, is there a downside to that? Will that effect the way the drive operates or using it as storage? Or will all this occur without my knowledge and operate as if I knew nothing of it?

[Limerick]

Hi Rwinegar,

It may be helpful to you to go back and review a thread that several of us were dialoging in a few weeks ago.

You may just want to create an image of your current drive, and store it over on the external drive. That will work well. It just depends upon what your particular backup strategy is, and how you want to make it happen. Ghost has lots of flexibility, depending upon your desires of how to put it through its paces.

Limerick

[rwinegar]

Thanks Limerick for pointing me to that other thread. It was most helpful.

I need to clear one thing up in my mind. After doing all this reading I am left with the impression that there is a difference between creating an "image" and a "clone" of WinXP to my second hard drive. What is the difference and does Ghost offer me a choice?

Also, is Ghost a whole drive copy? In other words if I want to ghost WinXP back to my primary drive, can I simply restore the WinXP part or will it restore the contents of the entire second hard drive back to the primary drive? Primary drive is 40GB. Second drive is 80GB. 80GB will not fit on a 40GB drive.

Thanks.

[Limerick]

Hi Rwinegar,

Your impression is correct. If you clone a drive or partition to another drive or partition, then you end up with two media that are exactly the same in content. Conversely, creating an image of a drive or partition, and storing that image on another partition, leaves the destination media just like it was initially, with the exception that the image file is then being stored on it.

is Ghost a whole drive copy?

The short answer is yes. It is possible to use the -skip switch so as to "skip" a file or folder when Ghost does its work. I played with this concept for a while once, but determined that it was more trouble than it was worth. I'd encourage you to think of it in terms of dealing with the entire drive, or partition. If you later decide that you included something in an image that you don't want, you can use the Ghost Explorer to remove it, and then recompile the image file.

One of the beauties of Ghost is that it allows you to restore a single file, a folder, an entire partition, or the entire drive (of multiple partitions.)

As long as there is space on the destination drive (40 GB in size in your example) to hold the data from the source drive (80 GB in your example), you will be fine. That is, if you have 35 GB of data on the 80 GB drive and you restore it to the 40 GB drive, it will work fine. (By default, Ghost will ignore all the "empty space" on the source drive.) If you had 55 GB of data, then obviously it would not restore to the 40 GB drive.

Limerick

[rwinegar]

Thanks Limerick. I think I understand the concept now.

[Jubal]

It may be a good idea to keep an FAT32 drive to store your data. That way if you have a disaster you will at least be able to access the data with a Windows 98 boot disk. The way I understand it NTFS will not read FAT32.