Using Ghost disk to disk copy
Sachin Ganu
8 January 2004
This document describes how to use the Ghost utility to perform a disk-to-disk cloning
Cloning hard disks of unequal sizes using the Ghost utility is a two step process. In the first step, the entire contents of the source hard disk are copied onto the destination hard disk partition by partition. In the second step, we need to manually install the MBR on the newly created disk to make it bootable
Following are the step-by-step instructions to clone disks (of same/different sizes) using the Ghost utility
- Connect the “golden client” (or the master copy) as primary hard disk and the destination disk as the secondary.
- Also, make sure you have a floppy drive connected
- Insert the Ghost boot floppy and power on the machine. (Make sure that BIOS boot sequence is correctly set to boot the floppy first)
- The floppy has a DOS-based application that will try to install the DOS Protocol Manager in order to enable Ghostcast sessions (For now, ignore this). In this step, it might complain about the LAN adapter. This is because there are different boot floppies for different NIC cards. Note that since we are using direct disk to disk copy this will not affect us and hence ignore this.
- At the end of the bootup, you should see the Ghost application
- Use disk to disk option and verify that the source and destination are correct (You may look at the disk sizes reported by Ghost utility to confirm this). The disks can be of different sizes
- Select all the default options that the utility asks for and then Ghost will proceed fine on its own.
- It will take about 3-5 minutes for a disk to disk copy after which Ghost will inform about successful imaging.
Once this is done we now need to install the MBR correctly on the new hard disk. The procedure for that is as follows. This assumes that you are using GRUB as the boot loader to install in the MBR The following steps need to be taken
- Connect the newly created hard disk to a machine and make sure that a CDROM is connected.
- Use a Knoppix boot CD and boot off the CD (Again, make sure that BIOS boot sequence is correctly set to boot the CDROM before the harddisk)
- Boot into the text mode by typing “knoppix 2” at the boot: prompt. This will just save time as by default the CD will boot into graphical mode
- At the command prompt, run the following
o mkdir hd
o mount –t ext3 /dev/hda2 hd
o chroot hd
o mount –t ext3 /dev/hda1 boot
o cd boot
o grub-install /dev/hda (You should “installed successfully” at the end of this step)
o cd ..
o umount boot (Do not forget this step)
o exit
o umount hd (Do not forget this step)
o reboot
Remove the CD, the harddisk is bootable now and ready to go